Social Media Women - Creating and Promoting a Community
Social Media Women is a formal networking group that encourages and assists women to participate more prominently in social media.
The group was established in March 2010 by our Director, Catriona Pollard and Nancy Georges after they identified the need for a networking group for women in social media.
We approached the launch of the group with a PR strategy focused on generating awareness, building membership and creating an online community for women in social media. It incorporated social media and traditional PR.
Traditional PR
With social media continually changing the nature of the marketing and media industry we identified women involved in these fields as our target audience.
A media release launching Social Media Women was distributed to marketing and media publications. As a result we achieved media coverage in AdNews, B&T, Campaign Brief, mUmBRELLA, Tech Marketing, Professional Marketing, Digital Media, Media Cafe and Dynamic Business, to name a few. This generated a significant level of awareness about the launch in our target audience.
The media release was also used to build the group’s online community and drive membership. It included the address of the Social Media Women website, the Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages, and details on how to register for the launch online.
Twitter
Twitter is a key element to the communication strategy with the aim of building an online community for women in social media. We tweeted daily about articles, news and events about social media and women in general. We built the Twitter following to 799 followers.
We created the hashtag #smwomen so that our target audience could centralise all Twitter conversation about the Social Media Women launch, as well as contribute to it.
Facebook
A Facebook page was created which was a place we could upload event information and photos, and engage with members. Facebook allowed the online community to interact with each other and view photos from each event. (An event is held each month). We also fed the Social Media Women’s blog into Facebook so that fans of the page would be alerted to any updates or new articles.
Social Media Women have a membership of over 250 women, and over 500 Facebook Fans.
LinkedIn
We created a Social Media Women LinkedIn group to connect all of the participants both online as well as offline. It provides a platform where the community can create discussions, make news announcements, even jobs that go specifically to members of the group.
We achieved an array of media coverage for Social Media Women, including the following:
Dynamic Business
Professional Marketing
