Meet the adviser: Jacinta Dempsey

Jacinta Dempsey is head of digital with FeedAlpha. “I’ve been with them since September. Before that I had my own business called The Social Network,” she explains.

Jacinta started her career in retail management and says the highlight of highlight of her retail career was when she was deputy brand manager in Topshop Knightsbridge. She is now involved in the start-up world.

FeedAlpha

FeedAlpha is a social media scheduling tool. “They are based in my hometown of Carlow, and I was very lucky to meet them,” she says. “They took me on full-time in September. They’re a start-up and for the last few months I have been redesigning the platform and helping grow the business.”

“When I was running my own business I did a lot of work alongside start-ups, it was kind of my thing. Especially female led start-ups.”

“I brought most of my clients over to FeedAlpha with me. Some of them have amazing success stories and have gone through different funding rounds. I love working with start-ups because it’s great fun and it’s exciting.”

Joining Enterprise Nation Ireland

Jacinta was introduced to Enterprise Nation through one of the UK advisors, Lucy Hall, who got her involved in one of the Enterprise Nation programmes for women.

“They were doing #SheMeansBusiness in Ireland, through Facebook. We had some exams to do to become Facebook trainers,” says Jacinta.

“I now have four certificates from Facebook, the top one being Facebook Lead Trainer. I used those so I could work on #SheMeansBusiness with Enterprise Nation Ireland.”

“That was all thanks to Lucy Hall who told me to go and do it,” she says.

Becoming an adviser

“I also signed up as an adviser with Enterprise Nation Ireland and they have had me giving talks at a few different events, and now I am involved with the Go and Go Online.,” she says.

This month will see the first of Enterprise Nation Go and Grow Online in person events. Go and Grow Online: Digital drop-in session takes place on 28th April in Carlow.

“My colleague Gary Evans will be doing some talks on SEO and I will be doing talks on social media, creative strategy and how to use social media to build your community.”

“People can book in for a half hour slot and talk about social media or SEO. They can come to our offices in Carlow, and we’ll sit them down, find out where they are at and what they need to do. We’ll help them take that next step and the event is completely free,” she explains.

From online to offline

“We’ve done a couple of sessions online and what we’ve found is at the end there are always loads and loads of questions. I love answering the questions. I nearly prefer to ask what the problem is and talk them through it, but we can’t always do that as there are certain topics which everyone needs covered,” she says.

“It will be really nice to do that one on one where we can really find out that is going on in someone’s business and how we can help them,” she adds.

What should new business owners be thinking about before they create a social media strategy?

Use tools that are available to check if people are actually searching for their product. Always look at that research first.

It can be as simple as doing a Google or Bing search, you will also be able to see who your competitors are.

If you would like to dig deeper use tools like Semrush or Google Trends to see how many people are searching for it. 

You can also dive deeper and find out the questions people are asking about your product, for example, ‘how to do my own social media’ or ‘how to set up a Facebook page’ (if you are researching marketing). Having that detailed information will help you to decide what kind of content you are going to put out and strategy you are going to have.