The Best Way to Market Yourself is Online!
The other day my girlfriend came to me and said she wants more out of life. At first I thought “heeere we go…” but then she started talking about yoga and my first thought was quickly brushed aside. She has a huge passion for yoga and has been doing it for a number of years now, going to classes, teaching her friends and has even tried to get me involved! But now she wants to make a career out of it and spread the word of yoga to every corner of the globe. As I have already done a lot of work this year focusing on improving Gourmet Burger Kitchens social media presence, combined with this, I’ve been inspired to write this blog, as what better way to get noticed out there than to put yourself online?
So this post is essentially a tour around a few marketing tools online, aimed at anyone who is looking show the world their talents, inspire others, and more importantly, attract potential employers.
The first thought in everyones mind when looking for a new job is to find the ‘Careers’ page of the employer you really want to work for. Alternatively you may choose to simply plug the job you want into google and be forced to troll through all the different agencies to find your new job. But believe me, their are better ways to get noticed!
“Knowing what social channels…the audiences are using is vital to ensuring the long-term success of any social media strategy.” (Taylor, 2013).
YouTube is a great social media platform which allows the digital world to discover, watch and share your videos online. What’s more, is that it is the 2nd most-used search engine behind its parent company Google. It act as a “forum for people to connect, inform and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small” (Youtube, 2015).
As much as I’m not a fan of the guy, Justin Bieber’s raise to fame was single handedly down to YouTube. He posted a video of himself performing, which generated a phenomenal response from the music industry, resulting in him being signed to a record label. What a great success story!
Instagram is a social networking site which has a community of over 300million users. It enables people to post pictures and videos onto their page, and share their activities on a variety of other social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr. It is primarily used on mobile devices, so it is a fantastic way to reach your followers whilst on the move. To find out more on how to get the most out of Instagram, take a read of this article.
When researching for this blog, I came across Laura Sykoria’s Instagram page. With over 1 million followers, Laura has been a huge hit in the Instagram community, and is now a great inspiration for my girlfriend who like I said early, is looking to do something similar.
Twitter is all about sharing: sharing content, owned or secondary, commentary, opinions and observations on pretty much everything (Taylor, 2013). It is another online social networking tool which users are able to post 140 character updates or “tweets” of what going on in their lives. It can include links to other webpages and pictures of what they’ve been up to among other things. The followers of the user can then “retweet” (share) the tweet. But what really put Twitter in a league of their own is the introduction of the #hashtag to the social networking world as it enables twitter users and businesses to create trending topics, which is a great way to engage with followers.
Vine is essentially the video version of Twitter, and was in fact bought by them in 2012. It enables users to record and edit their six-second-long looping videos to which their followers can “revine” (share) them with their own followers. Vine, like Twitter is a great way to keep your followers updated on what you are doing as well as promoting your own personal interests.
Heres more food for thought – an article by the ‘Huffington Post‘ detailing 8 ways to successfully market yourself online using such platforms as those explained above.
Like anything in this world, social media marketing does however have it downsides. It can be a very time consuming activity to which the information you post is only visible for a short amount of time before a new post replace it. Also, the ‘Information Systems Audit and Control Association’ released a report in June 2010 ranking hijacking and the lack of control of user generated content as the biggest threat to those who use social media to market themselves or their business.
References
Online Resources:
Youtube (2015). About YouTube – YouTube. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/en-GB/ [Accessed 20 May 2015].
Journals:
Taylor, N. (2013). Choosing between social media platforms and understanding the markets they reach. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, 3(9), pp. 283-291(9)