I am very involved in social media in my daily life, I am on most the relevant social media site, and I can be seen online very often. I have always heard how social media negatively impacts lives by instilling less-then-ideal mindsets and lifestyle. Though those statements are not baseless, I think it is important to value people’s autonomy in using social media. I am not ashamed to be a social media advocate, but in this blog, I will discuss how I interact with social media and how it has been affecting my life.
I treat social media very seriously, I think it is important for everyone to be responsible for the content that they put out. However, I also notice that my persistence on social media can be somehow extreme in some instance. I am very critical of my media content, combing through every piece of information to ensure that I am consistently portraying who I am to people, and for that image to be ideal and helpful to me. I view social media as an identity card, it houses who I am, or at least, who I aspire to be seen as.
I am constantly in pursuit of high-quality social media content.
I will talk more in depth in terms of my involvement with Instagram. I use Instagram very different from other social media sites. I see it as the place for me to work on my personal branding. I could take a hundred photos before I can pick one to post, and I can spend hours to think of a caption that will draw in the impressions and engagements. I also post Insta Stories daily, they could be about my everyday life, and I also have a series that goes into it. For instance, I came up with #weitoohungry as a segment for me to talk about my passion for food as well as posting cooking videos and culinary tips. Aside from that, #farfarawei is the hashtag that I use to indicate moments that are recorded abroad, either studying or traveling. I think it is good for a PR student like me to be more involved with creating connections and fostering relationships through social media for myself before I have to do it in a work setting next time.
Snapshot of #weitoohungry, an Instagram cooking series that I started last year.
I think I will continue to build my social media channel even when I am in the workforce. But I am also excited to see what field I will be in and how that will affect my social media use. I was a content intern in the past, and one of my jobs was to juggle four social media pages on my own. Being a social media manager difficult in the beginning, but the things that I learn really changed how I see social media. It helped me establish the importance of social media in this generation, as well as thought me ways to go about utilizing social media professionally and ethically. I think when I re-enter the media field, I will be more mature to discern content quality, as well as be more critical of the effects and information coming from social media.
Like I said before, I used social media mainly to build my personal brand. I think it is very important to have a presence in this media-centric world, which is why I spend a lot of my time experimenting and learning ways to improve my social media brand. I think personal branding means that you get to control the narrative, to have a first say in who you are and what you stand for. Personal branding helps you to showcase the aspects of your identity that you feel most confident in, in turn, this will affect how you view yourself and eventually, how other people see you. This is why I spend my time and effort on social media building my own brand; I know my personality, wittiness, and creativity is what I can best offer to the public, so I want to make sure that it can be easily seen n my social media identity.
Feature Image Credits:
https://www.pexels.com/photo/apple-applications-apps-cell-phone-607812/
Window of Technology 