I have just attended the first event of enterprise and employability week at Leeds Trinity University, which was a talk about digital media and how to promote yourself online, the talk was delivered by Jane Slimming of Zeal Media, Zeal Media is a digital media agency split into three parts: Zeal Digital which focussing on online advertising and marketing through means of SEO, affiliates and more, Zeal Create which focuses on web design and Zeal Buzz which is all about social media and online PR.
I thoroughly enjoyed the talk and found it interesting from start to finish, one thing that I did find intriguing was the amount of different careers that are available within a digital media company like Zeal, there are many different areas you can work in, such as; SEO, PPC, Social Media, Account Management, Design and Development etc. The thing that surprised me the most from that list though was the social media aspect, prior to this event I had no idea how complex and important the social media aspect of a business is, without a strong social media presence a business can loose clients and eventually fail. Jane then told us some of the intricacies of social media, such as never using Twitter or Facebook or any other social media platform to perform an "hard sell" you have to keep your friends and followers coming back to your channel and constantly telling them to buy something will "turn them away". Instead of the traditional "hard sell" we were told that many companies use there social media platform to give away certain things for free, this could be a voucher code, free business cards, free iTunes download; anything that will get people to come back to the social media sites, and like before prior to learning this from Jane I didn't know that was how social media worked for these sorts of media companies.
That is not all I learnt though, one other big thing I took away from this talk was a greater sense of how I could increase my chances of getting employed. To mention social media again it was mentioned during the talk that having a strong social media profile is critical to helping you get into a career, having a strong profile means making sure each of your social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) are up to date with relevant information, and making sure you don't post thing that can potentially put of job recruiters, such as swearing or putting up pictures of yourself on a night out as they will look at your Facebook before they meet you.
We get told all the time that experience is the most important thing when applying for a job, and this talk emphasised that greatly, Jane told us to ask an agency for one week un-paid work experience as employers will pick out who they hire on how much "relevant" experience they have. I already have a part time paid job with doing photography and work un-paid weekly for in-house production doing all various aspects of film production but if I learnt one thing from this talk it was that I can always do more, I should be taking my career seriously and put as much of my spare time into getting experience as I can before it will be incredible valuable when I leave Leeds Trinity and apply for a job.
One final thing we were told in regards to making ourself more employable is to be creative, we are among thousands of other students looking for jobs I need to make myself stand out. This is just he first event/talk I will be attending this week, I will be attending and righting about three more during the week, and after this talk I can say truthfully I am looking forward to attending the others
Useful Links:
www.zealmedia.co.uk
www.twitter.com/wehavezeal
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