Landing a job in social media is more than playing around on Facebook and sharing pictures of perfectly arranged flatlays in good lighting.
Working in social media is popular, and for good reason – it’s a dynamic, constantly changing area of marketing that requires both strategic thinking and a creative streak. For this reason, the competition can be high when social media job vacancies pop up.
If you want to stand out, here are the things your resume cannot do without:
Know your tools
Southeast Asia has one of the highest penetration of social media usage in the world. You may be very active on your personal channels, but managing a company’s social media presence requires you to know more than just the basics.
Show your future employer you’re familiar with the utilisation of different platforms by mentioning managing and monitoring tools you have used (e.g. Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, etc.) or at least understand. Give examples of how you have organised social media platforms in the past (or what you might suggest for current clients in the future, should you get the job).
Highlight the depth of your skillset and knowledge to give an added advantage.
Work well with others
Remember how important teamwork was in school? It applies to work, too. Working in social media doesn’t necessarily mean you will be staring at a screen all day – you’ll have to collaborate and communicate with other departments on projects and campaigns.
Describe your contribution to larger goals with other teams like sales, legal and marketing. If you’re fresh out of school, demonstrate your value by illustrating your experience with cross-collaboration and how well you’ve worked with other teams in the past.
Have a personal brand
The best way to show you understand the power of social is through your own brand. Take care to maintain your online profiles well, because you are applying for a social media job. And if you can’t manage your own brand, how can you manage someone else’s?
Link your resume to your most professional channels (and remember to clean up anything that could be found with a quick Google search). Make sure they are clean and clearly presented. Your public Instagram feed should reflect your unique personality, while your LinkedIn profile should emulate your professionalism.
Prove it
How will you contribute to your future company? As with most jobs, you’ll need to show that you’ve been productive. Social media metrics allow you to generate data that points to your output.
For example, if you’ve managed a business/club account on Facebook, show some data! Show if you’ve increased engagement and interactions with your customer base by 15 per cent, for example. Provide data that your strategy on Twitter led to a 20 per cent increase in followers or an increase of retweets by 10 per cent. If you don’t have any experience, you can still show how you’ve managed your own social accounts and grown your own followers.
