The study examined the habits and attitudes of women who participate in social media weekly or more. Of those, approximately half reported participating daily. Furthermore, of the 42 million women engaged in social media weekly:
• 55 percent participate in some form of blogging activity
• 75 percent participate in social networks, such as Facebook or MySpace
• 20 percent use Twitter

And the age demographics might surprise you:

To make the report even more relevant and timely, the study also looked at the impact the of the economy and ways that women are using the Internet to help navigate their economic situations. Key findings:

•  The economy is top-of-mind for women online
–  78% are considering purchases more carefully
–  73% are spending less overall

•  The Internet is a valuable economic resource
–  62% are comparing prices online more often
–  48% are spending more time online researching purchases
–  25% are trying to buy from “companies I know”

The numbers have changed drastically even just since last year’s report. To find out more about how women are going online in greater numbers, how online media is increasingly becoming a primary source for community and information for them, and how social media is influencing their purchasing habits, I’d definitely encourage you to take a closer look at this report!

Women in communications, marketing, business management and more enjoyed a panel about how technology should be embraced for marketing in a recession. As budgets are getting cut, this is one area experts recommend to hold on to because of the increased visibility, low-cost tools, and high value-add of online marketing.

Panelists Fran Boscker of Vantage Communications and Hilary Zwerdlin of M+R Strategic Services joined moderator Jennifer Kutz of Vantage Communications to share their experiences.

Boscker walked through several social media sites that marketers should have a comprehensive presence on, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube (see NGW’s 5W’s of online video!). She urged that the key to these tools is relationship-building, so it’s important to be a part of the conversation and not just push information out.

Zwerdlin shared the nonprofit angle and cautioned that although social networks are free, it’s important to keep in mind the staff time is required to manage all of these tools. With that, Zwerdlin recommends that nonprofits take advantage of Google Grants, manage their search engine optimization, and keep an eye on their analytics to see what’s working. A new benchmark study that many nonprofits use to gauge their statistics is coming out on Thursday at http://www.ebenchmark.com.

Kutz reminded participants to get back to public relations basics by using press releases and customer programs in addition to attending local networking events. Positioning yourself as a thought leader can be very low cost and valuable as long as you share information that is educational, neutral and newsworthy and use online tools to help release and promote things like white papers, events and news.

Now of course all of this information is just as valuable to men, but it’s nice that Women Who Tech is helping women succeed with broadband!