The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) has been registered on social media sites for some time, but had never regularly posted organization information and industry news. Therefore, the sites’ members never had reasons to visit these sites, leading to a lack of online interaction among members.
In early 2009, we started discussing SWE’s social media objectives – to get more member participation on our core sites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn), increase our brand presence in the social media arena and further SWE’s mission as an educational and service organization. Through this effort, we hoped that SWE members would find an informal venue to share experiences, advice, stories and questions with other members across the globe. Additionally, increased involvement would allow all members a diverse experience, as both collegiate and professional members from many industries could connect.
Our first step was to revisit each site and confirm that all information and images were up-to-date, followed by a simple task – just start posting. With the plethora of SWE news and events, members in the news and industry information we found, it was an easy, yet time-consuming, task to get our Facebook and Twitter pages filled with posts.
In our very next member newsletter, we added the sites’ icons, which directed many members to becoming fans and followers. We continue to see social media traffic via our newsletters, as well as through our social networking webpage on SWE’s main website. In addition, we promoted our Twitter page at last year’s WE09 Annual Conference, where staffers continually posted “tweets” about happenings during the conference.
Through these sites, we have posted surveys and obtained feedback on strategic issues for the Society, such as methods for improvement. For example, we conducted a survey to determine which of our social media sites SWE members use most often. The results demonstrated the need for enhanced visitor experiences at some sites, while taking aspects of favorite sites to those with less traffic.
From April 2009 (our first complete month of revamping interaction) to October 2010, we posted the following results for increase in subscribers:
• Facebook: Approximately 270%, from 2504 to 6738 fans
• Twitter: Approximately 1280%, from 61 to 782 followers
• LinkedIn: Approximately 835%, from 338 to 2822 members
In addition, member comments have increased from April 2009 to October 2010. In the first three months, we posted an average of 39 monthly comments for all sites combined. In the last three months, we posted an average of 204 monthly comments for all sites combined.
Lastly, partially as a result of a SWE social media followers, Mattel Inc. announced Engineer Barbie® would be one of two "I Can Be ..." career Barbie® dolls to be released in Q4 of 2010. SWE alerted its 20,000 members about Mattel's contest in a weekly email newsletter and it went viral from there. In fact during January of 2010, over 1,800 tweets discussed the contest and urged fellow female engineers to cast their votes.
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