Authenticity before professionalism
Female empowerment on Instagram - Enita Ramaj, Editor in Chief Brand Development at cosmopolitan.de, madame.de and männersache.de, provides answers.
An entry by Joelle Wörtche and Vanessa Kokoschka
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Media, Technology and Society
Entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs – women are still underrepresented in leadership positions. We observe that especially women are active on social media channels like Instagram to spread and share a new kind of community communication and their own messages. There, they usually show themselves versatile: both professionally and privately. We investigate whether digitalization is a driving force for female empowerment and ask the question: what does a confident social media presence depend on? Enita Ramaj from Cosmopolitan provides the answers.
In our research work, we deal with the topic of female empowerment on Instagram. For this purpose, we have selected three Instagram accounts that are run by women who are professionally successful and show themselves on the platform both professionally and privately. In our research, we aim to triangulate methods. In practice, this means that we first examine the selected accounts with a content analysis. In parallel, we conduct expert interviews with the owners of the profiles. In addition, we include the perspective of other users (user interviews) and examine the impact of the selected accounts.
One of our interview partners is digital expert Enita Ramaj. She is Editor in Chief Brand Development at cosmopolitan.de, madame.de and männersache.de. In addition to her personal opinion as a private person, she is able to assess the media impact and targeting of social media accounts from a professional perspective. In this article, we summarize the five key learnings for you:
- It’s no longer about empowering, but about engaging. According to Enita Ramaj, women are now strong enough. It’s now more about showing ways forward and engaging in a barrier-free exchange. Women should inspire each other and can become identification figures on Instagram.
- The trend is away from perfectionism and toward authenticity. „I think it’s more important to embody a message to the outside world. To show your community what you stand for,“ says Enita Ramaj. In terms of content, it’s no longer about perfectly retouched photos, but about real stories that are really personal.
- The message determines the success. This formula applies to both digital and analog campaigns on female empowerment. The advantage of social media is that the message is spread faster and the exchange with users is direct and permanent. Offline, success is more dependent on media coverage.
- For Enita Ramaj, authentic and successful storytelling on Instagram is all about telling personal stories and sharing them with the community. The content can also be more daring or have a twinkle in the eye to appeal to the target group. Different and regular formats also work well on Instagram to involve the community more. Important: „Users should market their message and not themselves.“
- The community idea is totally important – the common denominator is always the story and the message: to network with other profiles, with people who have similar messages. Cosmopolitan has the „supporther“ format, a cross-media initiative that has been supporting the female engagement movement for three years.
Curious now? More information and the final results of our research project will be available here on this blog soon.