The SSE Airtricity League of Ireland Women’s Premier Division kicks off tomorrow and has been treated to the same high level rebranding that we have seen in the past two weeks for the Men’s Premier and First Division teams.

As we have done for both of those leagues we have run the rule over how the teams are being promoted on the Twitter social media platform.

It is a little different for the Women’s League as we have seven of the teams that are part of a club that also fields in the Men’s and three that are stand alone in their own right.

Adding in the mix that four of the clubs that field both have created a stand alone Twitter account but three have chosen to promote more to their larger club account and it is a little more complex than for the men’s.

Nevertheless, it is an exercise we feel is worth doing to set a benchmark for future seasons.

The first thing is that the numbers for the stand alone women’s team accounts are smaller. The average size of the follower base in the men’s Premier Division is 34,900 and in the Men’s First Division, it is 14,500. The equivalent for the Women’s Premier division is only 4,200.

The League of Ireland account (@LeagueofIreland) has 53,300 followers versus 10,600 for the specific @LOIWomen account.

The biggest account is that of Peamount United, closely followed by Cork City’s Women’s account. Cork have the biggest following on the Men’s side and have perhaps the greatest capacity for growth.

Wexford Youths and Athlone Town have bigger follower bases on the Women’s side than Shamrock Rovers, Sligo Rovers and Athlone Town but they have a longer history as well.

In order to judge the impact of sharing the Women’s Club News and promotion with the wider base we have today just taken a very small sample of the number of tweets in the last ten sent out in advance of this dual weekend that relates to the Women’s side.

Galway United and Athlone Town, fresh from their President’s Cup win last weekend top the charts hear with six out of ten.

Bohemians and Shelbourne have both gone down the route of promoting as one club and have given three and two of the last ten over to the Women’s side. That greater emphasis is as you would expect over Sligo Rovers, Cork City and Shamrock Rovers who have all created specific accounts.

The trade off is that you are speaking to a larger but less specific audience.

This is clearly an imprecise measure of the commitment but you have to start somewhere and it is something we will be keeping an eye on over the course of the campaign.

All five of the opening round of fixtures will be streamed live on LOITV and we wish all the teams, as well as the teams behind the teams, the best of luck for the season ahead.