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Best Construction Blog – Constructing Equality

By March 24, 2015CMA News

At this week’s Construction Marketing Awards for 2014, Constructing Equality Ltd. scooped the award for Best Construction Blog.

The judges commented: “This blog is an easily accessible guide to the ins and outs of diversity and equality in the construction industry. It is a fantastic idea that provides an excellent service.”

As regular reader will know, our weekly blog discusses issues, challenges and good practice surrounding fair working practices, equality and diversity in the UK construction industry, and has developed a readership of over 300 people per month (enhanced by the over 6000 subscribers to our newsletter).

The Construction Marketing Awards are an annual event recognising marketing excellence across the built environment. The category of Best Construction Blog was new this year, with nominations being made by those working within the industry followed by a public vote to select the shortlist.

It feels a bit strange to be blogging about our blog, but we thought you might be interested to ‘peep behind the curtain’ and see some of the details and statistics about our (now award winning) weekly blog.

Our main audience is from the United Kingdom but there is growing interest from the United States, Canada and Australia.

Depending on the topics that we cover we have between 150-250 readers, giving on average 320 page impressions over that time.

We have found that since moving the blog to our website we have had an increased number of connections gaining contact with us, which has led to both sales and developing strategic relationships with individuals and organisations relevant to our future plans.

We have also seen an increase in engagement with our audience through our blog. This is an indication that more people are becoming aware of fairness, inclusion and respect in the construction industry and are wanting to find out further information, such as how this impacts upon them as an individual.

Our blog is shared across our social media profiles to reach both existing and new readers. We have over 200 followers on Facebook, and over 970 followers on Twitter. The number of readers increased by more than double since we reviewed and adapted our Social Media Strategy, a percentage increase of 167% over the past year

Depending on the topic of the blog, we receive 15-60 clicks on the link from social media each week. We receive 1 or 2 ‘shares’ on Facebook, and more than double this in retweets on Twitter. We add links to our blog to 17 different groups on LinkedIn, which is by far the most popular forum for reader engagement. We usually see 4 or 5 discussions started per blog, and many of these are still ongoing months later.

Naturally we’re all really chuffed to have won this award, so here are some comments from the office:

“Winning this award is brilliant – we blog about very challenging issues sometimes so it’s great to know the industry values our contribution to making construction a fair place to work.” – Caroline Gee, Head of Operations and Be Fair Service Manager

“Winning this award has been a great achievement for us, and it is heart-warming to know that people enjoy our weekly blogs and see them good enough to win such a prestigious award” – Patrick Hughes, Finance.

“The responses we get to our blog posts never cease to amaze me, and for our readers to not only nominate us for this award, but also vote us through to the final round shows just how much they appreciate our insight into the issues covered.” – Matt Crouch, Marketing, Training and Product Development.