21 Sep 2015

Calling all Twitter addicts, Tumblr tragics, Facebook fiends and Instagram enthusiasts–this one’s for you. I’m sure a lot of you, like me, spend your time doing seemingly pointless things on the internet. We use social media for fun, for an escape, to document our lives and share them with our friends. We’re not thinking about the future when we’re memeposting on Tumblr or livetweeting The Bachelor–but maybe we should be.

I mean, I certainly haven’t spent nearly three years carefully curating my beautifully rainbow Tumblr archive for nothing (seriously, it takes a lot of time. And a lot of effort). It might seem pointless to you, and my parents, but because I’ve dedicated so much time to it, it’s something I’m proud of.

I haven’t spent five years racking up over 100k tweets to no avail. I haven’t been deleting people I don’t know or like off Facebook when it alerts me it’s their birthday for no reason. I’ve built my little corner of the internet, created a presence, an aesthetic (if you will), full of things I like and people I like as well. All this time, I’ve been learning skills that are becoming more and more integral to corporate life, as well as everyday – and so have you.

Companies are increasingly needing people who are social media savvy to help them reach further and further. Guess what? You’ve got those skills built in, and you’ve already been practising for years.

All those years of half-watching, half-listening to Youtube videos while doing homework and keeping up with Twitter at the same time have made you a multitasker of the highest degree. Even those snippets of code you learned when you were making your Myspace profile at 13 will give you an edge. You’ve got an eye for design, layouts and a firsthand knowledge of what kind of content people want to see online.

You’ve got a comprehensive grasp of slang, a deep understanding of the inner workings of memes, and you know that despite what the oldies (and Hollywood, it seems) think, you can’t just say “viral?” and then expect it to immediately “go viral”.

You’ve already got an online presence, and you can capitalise on that. Spending years gaining friends and followers on the internet means you’ve got a network of people that care about you, or at least what you have to say. They can help share your work, get the word out, worldwide. They might have sources, or info, or ideas and inspiration.

You can use your blog as a portfolio of work–whether you’re into photography, or writing, or anything else in between, a professional looking blog will act as a log for your work, and showcase your artistry to employers.

But remember when we all had to make new emails when we started applying for jobs because up until then we’d been using ones we made when we were 11? The same thing applies here. If you’re still tweeting from @ilovejustinbieber, it might be time to rebrand for the future. Use your name as your handle, and use the same handle on every platform you can to create your image. If you can’t bear to make the switch from sh*tposting to a more refined way of tweeting (like me), make a second account to be profesh on.

Also, I’m not going to delve into it (because I know you’ve heard it a million times) but you’ve gotta be careful about what you’re posting, now more than ever. But who really wants that image of themselves blind drunk and mid-spew on their Facebook page anyway? Keep it clean, people.

Last but not least, if spending almost 24 hours on the internet every day for years has given us anything, it’s the ability to stay up all night and still function as a human being the next day. And also the knowledge that while our eyes do not literally go square from staring at a screen for too long, sometimes they do really hurt. That’s nature’s way of telling us we should log off and go outside for a bit – but I don’t let nature tell me what to do. #YOLO. (Sorry).