Project: Girls in Tech Oz Twitter

A recent goal I set for myself is to develop my experience and skills in social media coordination. I would love to be able to work in social media and my lack of previous experience isn’t helping me get any jobs in this field! Social media coordination is a great freelance skill too, so I’m keen to apply myself, gain some experience and further develop my abilities!

I’ve volunteered to handle the Twitter account for Girls In Tech Oz, a community I’ve become a part of with Tammy Butow and some other friends. Here’s a bit about the initiative:

Girls in Tech Oz is a social network for women in technology based fields focused on connecting, educating and empowering each other. We do this by holding casual meetups and mixers, helping out with area conferences and tech events, and taking on key community projects, like Laptops for Ladies.

Girls in Tech is a global social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent and influential women in technology. As young women with the capacity to inspire, we made it our personal desire and passion to create and sustain an organization that focuses on the collaboration, promotion, growth and success of women in the technology sector.

Since this is my first time taking on a Twitter account for an organization, I find myself feeling pressured and puzzled when it came to posting relevant, engaging, interesting posts regularly. I quickly realized that this effort would take some brainstorming and strategic planning.

I met with Tammy and Jess last week to discuss the initiative and get a better idea of the organization and its business plans. We came up with a few ideas for our tweets:

- Set Google Alerts based on keywords related to the organization: women+technology, australia+technology. (I could use some more suggestions, I find it hard to break down such a broad topic!) - Re-write interesting/relevant tweets: Instead of re-tweeting someone else’s post, it can be useful to share the same link/post in our own words. - Sign off on tweets, so that followers know who is posting what. - Introduce members to the whole group, state who they are, what they do and what makes them a tech girl. - Introduce members to one another using @symbols.

I put together a few tweets and scheduled them to post at different times with Hootsuite. Although these tips were useful, I feel as though I need to come up with more strategies for content. I will post them here as I come up with them!

26/4/2011

Idea:

Find sites, networks, blogs, zines, articles about and by Australian women contributors in tech, IT, web, communications, business, entrepreneurship, etc. Strategy:

Follow sites, RSS blogs & zines, bookmark networks, google alert news & articles. Read through these compiled resources weekly, find female contributors, locate on Twitter, introduce them and what they do/write about to GirlsInTechOz followers.

This introduces our followers to women all over Australia in the Tech+related industries, makes way for networking, connecting and creating opportunities.