Hi everyone! My name is Jackie and I'm a senior communications student also obtaining a certificate in public and professional writing. This semester, I will be interning with the PPW certificate and major here at Pitt specifically focusing on creating promotional strategies and acting as one of the program's social/informational liaisons.
As far as my experience with social media goes, I'm nowhere near an expert or professional level. The platforms that I mainly use are Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. I don't think that I post enough and when I do, I'd be happy to reach like 40 likes as compared to other people's 500. I'm very interested in the professional benefits social media has to offer as it could be a future career for me. I plan on moving back to my hometown (Williamsport, PA) and working for one of our local advertising agencies. There is a huge market for a social media strategist because of all the small businesses in town. This would be a great addition to the services offered at the local advertising agencies and why they would invest in me.
With this class, I hope to learn how to get these businesses interested in the use of social media to promote and maintain their brands' presence within the community. Ultimately, the money side and how to put a price on the creation of social media strategies is important to me as well. If I also find ways to spruce up my personal social media brand too, that would be cool.
This course has opened my eyes to see how social media has become so ubiquitous in society today. It has made me seriously reflect on my personal content and how I think I need to present myself to not only friends and family, but also potential employers. As far as how I learn about social media the best goes, I think that graphs and visuals in the readings really resonate with me. I tend to remember images rather than blocks of text. I do not think this is different from other subjects that I have studied.
With this being said, the texts (that contain all of these graphs and charts) would have to be the first aspect of the course that has helped me develop the most. I think that the interview was also a great assignment due to all of the real world information that the class collected and shared about this field of work. It might be cool to collect something from everyone's interviews and create a single document or guide for the class (like the Good Content Google Slides presentation). The third most helpful aspect of the course is the semester long project. We actually get to put into practice what we learn about and will leave the class with a project that would impress future employers.
I wish we could actually write some posts or create visual content for our chosen entities instead of only talking about the theories that drive social media accounts. I also wish that we were learning more of the business side to this industry. I plan on possibly entering into a career in social media and I would like to know how to put a monetary value on my work. I understand that this aspect of this field is still being worked out, but it would be interesting to see how some companies have handled this subject.
This website contains a variety of work that was completed for Professional Uses of Social Media. The About Me page shows my LinkedIn Header and my Social Media Map. The map basically shows how I use various social media platforms. The next tab is my Final Strategy for the City of Williamsport. There, you will see the final version of the work I created in the Process Doc. The Process Doc tab is filled with the weekly assignments that make up the rough draft of the final strategy. In addition to the work that I drafted for the City of Williamsport, there is also an interview that I conducted with a professional in the social media field. Additionally, there is a social media audit questionnaire that I filled out when studying a classmate's social media accounts and a makeup assignment that showed annotations that i made for an article about what makes content go viral. There were also two assignments that did not have to take on our chosen entity for the semester long Process Doc. The first is a story that we had to tell through a social media platform. I chose to retell the classic story of The Little Red Hen in a Twitter thread. Finally, we wrote op-eds. Mine was about the pressures that people feel about social media and how these platforms can affect their careers. I am mostly excited for the final strategy as I have spent the whole semester working on it. The final strategy will also be extremely useful for job interviews as it will show that I can create effective social media strategies.