A good online presence is crucial to growth in the media industry I would say. The next few headings will outline my thoughts on why you should establish a good presence, where you should do it and how you should go about doing it.
First and foremost, let’s start at the simple question of, why should you have an online presence?
Why?
When you’re looking to get a job in the creative industry, certainly from my experience, its quite difficult to find something that is listed for your knowledge and expertise. Take my experience for example, I have trained in several aspects of the creative industry, with radio presenting to station management. As well as script writing to camera operation. Even with all of that I still ended up in a supermarket job that I hated for 5 years.
What you Can do
Just because you have the know how and a bit of paper that says you can do it. That doesn’t always mean an employer is even going to look at you, and in fact, in most cases it means exactly this. Having an online presence gets all of your work out and into the open, so that people can see exactly what you CAN do rather than just what you know.
With a presence online you can build a following from people all around the globe. And have potential employers from anywhere on earth see your stuff.
To do this you have to really stand out amongst everyone else aiming for the same area as you. Stand out, be that luminescent koi in the pond of orange and white ones, make everyone question if you’re real.
But where can you do this? Where can you post the stuff you poured your heart and soul into? Where is best?
Where?
I feel like it differs between people, depending on what nature of things they want to show off and how they feel about certain methods. For example, an artist would be better making an ArtStation page rather than a YouTube page if they only did still pieces. Whereas a programmer could spread what they have posted on GitHub throughout the numerous social media outlets.
As for me I'm still unsure of what direction I wish to go in terms of focus, so I chose to go with a website to showcase everything I've made and want to show off. There are a couple of things that nobody will see as I'm just plain and simply not happy with them. I felt a full-on website is best to compile everything on; as I have projects spread across two YouTube channels, so this is a good place to bring them together in one showcase area.
So, you now have the location of where you want to store all your portfolio pieces to show off. That’s great but you’re lacking that one crucial little extra. How is anyone going to find you if you don’t spread your content around?
How?
There are numerous ways to go about doing this, and social media is the biggest one that jumps to everyone’s minds really. You could make a Meta page to grow a community and share posts linking people to stuff. The same can be said for what I do, and that is to have a Twitter account dedicated to you or your indie company.
But let’s say these two aren't your thing. How about Instagram? An app/site for sharing images and photographs, think of it like a social media version of ArtStation. On here you could share concept art or even development screenshots and short videos. With the correct tags you never know, you may find a vastly growing community you wouldn't have gotten on Meta or Twitter.
There is one other however, and this one’s for all you motion folks out there. Got some gameplay you want show off? a video you want to tease a really cool action sequence from. Then how about TikTok? Its popularity surged with the younger audience. Although it's mainly a music app, the amount of creative people on there is incredible. Like with Instagram you could share development short videos here too.
With anything you post, whether it be a blog post or a tweet. You should always be mindful of how it is worded. Be sure to use clear and concise text. It needs to be readable and understandable.
With the likes of a tweet it should be clear, short and to the point. As few words as possible but all the information needed to really get the point across.
With a blog post it should still be clear, easy to ready and in a tidy format. Think about separating your post with different headings as well as sub headings. You should also think about dividing up paragraphs. A large paragraph may put people off reading, and if they don't want to read then they wont stick around.
In Summary
You should have a good online presence across multiple different areas. And you should share them around for people to see, even if in the beginning the only people that see them is one person. Remember one person can tell two people, and they could tell two more and before you know it, you’re drowning in followers. The more people that see your stuff, the more likely you are to be spotted by someone who wants to hire you.
What are you’re thoughts on a question like this? What do you use to spread yourself around?
Maybe I’ve forgotten to mention something or somewhere that is considered better that all the things I mentioned. Let me know down in the comments bellow.
Here is a great video I found from the channel 'Marketing 360' on tips for building your brand.
Comments