Social Lives #1 | Hello // Jobs from the BBC, Amazon & Komoot // How to add alt tags to Instagram posts // Ginger Steve
Hello, I’m Christina.
If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. So, you may know already that I work in social media and run my own social media and digital content agency. You may also know that I’ve worked on projects for brands like Unilever, Amazon Prime Video, Holland and Barrett, Aldi UK, Channel 4, E4, Adobe Creative Cloud and Babybel. And that I’ve been paid money to pretend to be the Jolly Green Giant, The Laughing Cow, a talking Christmas carrot and a mini snack cheese who only communicated in lyrics from Westlife songs (genuinely one of the best days of my working life) on social.
In 2016, after working in the industry for a number of years, I decided to turn freelance after being made redundant from a job I hated. It wasn’t a hard decision. I was finding it increasingly difficult to find a decent social media job in the North West of England, where I live and I was gradually realising that I really really hated working in offices. While redundancy was crappy, it wasn’t as crappy as going to numerous job interviews and giving away my best ideas for free.
While many of the freelance roles I found were based in London and required you to work in an office five days a week, I knew that the work I did was good and that I could make as decent a living from it working from my dining room in my pyjamas as I could sat in an agency. I also knew from experience that most of the time, you don’t need to work in an office to do social media well. You just had to prove this to potential clients.
Going freelance and setting up my own business is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It’s also been one of the hardest. While there’s a lot of fantastic resources out there for freelancers (particularly freelance writers), there’s not so much available for freelance social media professionals. A lot of the information I’ve found about finding - and retaining - work is often not geared towards my industry, written by people with overly large egos or just plain wrong.
I want Social Lives to be the thing I was looking for when I was freaking out about whether I could be a successful social media freelancer. Each week, you’ll find links to freelance jobs (my aim is to ensure that at least half of these are remote working opportunities), industry tips, advice and the occasional cat picture.
You don’t have to be a Guru, a Rockstar or a Ninja to be good at social. You just need common sense.
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JOBS BOARD:
Sicilia Mia, a newly opened restaurant in Notting Hill, is looking for a contractor to help with their social media. Could be good if you’re a junior looking for experience.
Komoot, a cycling and hiking app, is looking for a remote community manager.
Amazon are looking for a social media manager for their Ring app. It’s 12 month maternity cover, but it looks like a well paid role, plus it’s remote working.
Born Social are looking for freelance social media strategists. You’ll need to know how to pitch and how to pull together a good deck.
Not freelance as such, but BBC are looking for part time (17.5 hours per week) community managers to work across their BBC One, Two, Four, iPlayer, Comedy and BBC Masterbrand accounts. Weekend and evening work is included with this one, but it looks like a fantastic opportunity for someone *really* into their TV.
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APP OF THE WEEK:
Canva
Canva is a really simple graphic design app optimised for iPhone, Android and the web, allowing you to design everything from CVs to social media assets. It has access to images from Unsplash, plus a load of fonts meaning that you can make your content look as fancy as you like.
Handily, it also has pre set dimensions for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram posts, meaning that you can just create an asset, download it and post it rather than fiddling around for hours in Photoshop. I absolutely swear by it and regularly use it when I need to design presentation decks for clients. Best of all, it’s pretty much free. While you may have to pay some money to download some of its ‘premium’ fonts and imagery, you’ll pay at most $1 per image.
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IN THE NEWS:
We really should all be doing this anyway, but here’s a handy how-to on adding alt text to your Instagram posts.
Good news for anyone who has ever come from the pub and decided to go on a ASOS spree - you are not alone! Drunk shoppers ‘spend $48B per year while intoxicated’
I’m continually fascinated by the way that teenagers subvert social media channels as someone currently writing this in Google Docs, so I loved this piece on how it’s become the newest way to pass notes and gossip in class.
If you spend as much time on the internet and Twitter as I do, you will have suffered at least one cringe attack where your brain decides to remind you of that time you were really drunk and said something howlingly embarrassing. Here’s how to survive your next one.
"Clique forming — whether IRL or on Twitter — is a fundamental part of our human nature and, therefore, something that is unlikely to change." On Twitter cliques.
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THINGS I LIKE:
Natasha Lyonne was on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday and I could honestly listen to her read the phonebook.
I’m really enjoying the ‘Bad Gays’ podcast about terrible Gays in History. This week’s episode on Oscar Wilde’s evil Twink lover 'Bosie' is particularly good.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about these cookies since someone posted a link to them on Twitter the other day.
Scott Walker sadly died on Monday, so let’s all listen to ‘The Electrician’ - one of his most haunting tracks - in tribute.
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CAT PICTURE OF THE WEEK:
Ginger Steve sort-of lives with my parents, by which I mean that one day he (literally) head butted his way through their cat flap and never really left. My Dad is convinced he looks like Robbie Savage.
See You Next Thursday!
If you liked Social Lives, please forward it to your friends and ask them to subscribe! You're also very welcome to buy me a coffee via https://ko-fi.com/cattington. Mine's a Regular Cappuccino, ta.