This week’s lecture and tutorial was all about social media platforms and how important social media is for business when used in the correct way. What I found most useful personally was the seven great steps to be mindful of when using social media to promote your business.
Firstly, you need to think about your objectives. What are they exactly? What do you want to achieve. Secondly who is your target audience and what is your ideal client? It’s important to think about what type of network you would choose to attract this certain type of client as different networks are suited to different audiences i.e. Facebook and LinkedIn.
It’s then important to look at what user name, logo and tagline’s you would use keeping it consistent between all platforms. Then you’d need to set it up professionally. It’s important to make sure you upload quality content, idealy 30% promoting yourself, 30% promoting someone else, 30% quality information and the last 10% a bit of personal “bling” like a video that motivates you, a meme etc.
I thought this was really interesting because it shows a great balance of not only self promotion, but promotion of others too. It’s a good balance and I agree that target audiences are attracted to this balance.
Another important point is to post consistently and manage your social media platform appropriately. Then finally checking whether or not you are achieving what you intended by reflecting on your initial objectives.
During the class we watched an interesting YouTube video about popular games designer Phil Fish. Prior to the class I had not heard of him, however this was a perfect example of someone who has used social media in the wrong way. He rose to fame very quickly via social media and unfortunately he portrayed a very negative self image, even though these people had never met him in real life. He never held back on expressing his opinion to any kind of subtle comment and outright abused people in return. This in turn created an extremely negative online presence to the point that anything positive he posted was eventually ignored.
This proves how important professional social media conduct is particularly in the creative media industries. These days social media is such a powerful tool for marketing purposes it’s important to always portray yourself and your online presence positively.
In class we also discussed professional Resume writing. I’ve had a Resume for quite a few years that I’ve used for various jobs along the way however something I took away from todays class and something I haven’t really done to any great extent in the past. This is tailoring my Resume in a way that suitable for specific occupations.
It’s really tempting to just load your Resume with all your skills and experience because you might want to show an employer everything you’ve done in the past and how good you are, when in actual fact they just want to see what’s actually relevant to the job itself.
Another point I took away was keeping the Resume to just 2 pages. Employers want to see a document that’s brief and straight to the point. I could imagine that flicking through pages and pages of irrelevant information is not only frustrating but also time consuming for the interviewer.
REFRENCES
Gary Vaynerchuk. (2014, October 17). #AskGaryVee episode 33: Increasing exposure through business development. YouTube. YouTube. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/D1zSNVQ_Aes?list=PLfA33-E9P7FC0AoARnMLvgFgESJe4_Ngs
Innuendo Studios. (2014, June 16). This is Phil Fish. YouTube. YouTube. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/PmTUW-owa2w
SAE_CIU_OverviewofIndustry, & Institute, S. C. (2015, March 9). Week 6: Social media and your career — self-directed practitioners. Retrieved 30 October 2015, from https://medium.com/self-directed-practitioners/week-6-social-media-and-your-career-21ec52b2b003#.48ousfrq7
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