Week 3: Social Media & Your Career

In week three we had a lecture on social media and your career, which talked about networking, promoting yourself and using social media to accomplish the two, the lecture also shed some light on how to be a bit more “professional” online.

Using the lecture as source material there are many strategies for promoting yourself online as well as asking yourself several questions. These questions range from what objectives you are trying to fulfil, what your limits on resources are (time and money), what you will post and how you will monitor and measure results. Another important question to ask after answering the previous questions is which social media to use for your networking, will it be YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest or other websites that are blogging websites for example Tumblr? 

You might be asking yourself what exactly are the pros and cons of some of these websites?

Taking LinkedIn as the first example, the pro(s) for it is that it is a professional network designed for industry networking where your contacts indicate your affiliation and connects, where as your profile informs potential clients and employers of your skills, previous and current work. The con(s) of LinkedIn is that it isn’t designed for socialising, and is instead meant to build upon your current and possibly future networking of other industry professionals. In short LinkedIn is actually a very important part of your networking, for an example from statistics a large amount of business service providers and recruiters use LinkedIn as indicated in the diagram below.

What Social Media Platforms Are Best Suited For Your Business, 2014.

The pro(s) and con(s) of Facebook; the pro(s) of Facebook is definitely the heavy socialising as it is intended for that, the con(s) depends on your privacy settings (information people can see) and that it is very easy to pull someone’s name into the dirt (so to speak) by spreading rumors or people finding out about your past and specifically what you post can lead to a severely negative impact/ view point from your peers and employee/ potential employers/ clients.

The pro(s) and con(s) of YouTube; The number one pro of YouTube is that it is a website designed for uploading and sharing videos/ small video clips. The reason why this is a pro is because if you are a person in the creative industry, let’s say an animator or visual effects artist you upload a show reel (short showcase of your best work or previous work), this allows people and employers to view your work and what you are capable of. When it comes to other industry professionals is that they could possibly share the video/ show reel of yours and show other people by uploading it onto their own blog(s) or Facebook, which in turn helps boost your networking and social media. The con of YouTube is that it isn’t exactly community friendly, as in there is a high chance that someone will “troll” you and leave negative comments on your video(s).

Talking about how to be more professional online there is definitely a reason as to why you would want to be professional, and that the view point of other people. You might wonder why it matters what others think of me. It definitely matters, especially if you want to have a career or positive presence online, as this heavily helps you finding employment or clients. You might wonder as to why a negative view would be bad. For the negative I will use an example, and the example is a YouTube video called ‘This Is Phil Fish’ by Innuendo Studios (2014). The video talks about the concept/ image of Phil Fish and not actually personally about Phil Fish, it also talks about why you should not bad mouth other people, to be clear with what you are saying and not to be a narcissi as this impacts you negative, and that once someone becomes famous people will definitely talk (positively or negatively) more about you and react/ over react more especially if you are more famous than you deserve to be.

I myself do have a LinkedIn and the network I have on it is with previous students who have graduated and previous SAE employees, apart from that I do not advertise myself on Facebook, I like to keep that separate, nor do I have anything to show on YouTube. I do however upload artwork to various websites such as Pixiv and Tumblr. A good thing about Tumblr is that networking with other artists there and sharing their work definitely boosts your networking as they will sometimes share your work in return. I will speak from experience, it does feel quite nice to have people enjoy your work, as it fills you with a self-satisfaction and depending on you draw and compare it to other genres you can see which is more popular among other bloggers and people. It definitely helps to get a view on what other people like, essentially its comparing different topics/ genres in the market on what is currently popular before it dies down.

References:

Innuendo Studios. (2014, June 16). This is Phil Fish [Video Files]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w&feature=youtu.be

Patel, N. (2014). Retrieved from https://www.quicksprout.com/2014/09/05/what-social-media-platforms-are-best-suited-for-your-business/

SAE Creative Industry. (2015). Week 3: Social Media & Your Career. Retrieved from https://medium.com/self-directed-practitioners/week-6-social-media-and-your-career-21ec52b2b003#.sa47jp629

 

What Social Media Platforms Are Best Suited For Your Business [Image] (2014). Retrieved from https://www.quicksprout.com/2014/09/05/what-social-media-platforms-are-best-suited-for-your-business/