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Social Media – getting ahead of the game

It’s more important now than ever before to interact online in order to find opportunities and jobs, engage with prospective employers, and generally keep up-to-date with the industry.

Linked In

• Keep your profile professional and have a clear statement about what you want to achieve.
• Linked In is a good way to keep in touch with other professionals you’ve worked with or met at events where it’s not appropriate to add them on facebook!

Facebook – the Heat magazine of social media!

We wouldn’t generally recommend adding other professionals as friends (but use your sense of judgement with this!) but there are some useful groups on facebook that you can join to get access to news and opportunities, and interact with fellow filmmakers:

• First Light
• Producer’s Forum
• BFI Future Film
• Your ITV Apprenticeship
• DiVA (Diversity in Visual Arts)
• Women in Film and Television

Twitter

Twitter is a great way to connect with individuals and organisations and be in the know 24-7. Newsletters might get sent out once a week, but tweets are live, current news!

• You have 140 characters to say what you have to say – so no waffling, and keep to-the-point!
• You can use it to network, make and retain connections and find fellow filmmakers to collaborate with.
• The best way to build followers is to use it regularly, get involved, have an opinion (but don’t be annoying) and a personality.
• It’s not an announcement service; it’s all about engagement. Be a person and join the conversation, ask questions.
• Engage with prospective employers, but don’t play the numbers game, they will suss you out!

Some useful people to follow:
@firstlightfund, @pinewoodstudios, @Step2JobsTV, @DiVA_Film, @CreativeChoices, @running4itv, @Denofgeek

Programmes such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite can be useful as they allow you to schedule your tweets, and post things to multiple platforms at a time.