Background
My experience with immersing myself into the niche of Social Media Management (SMM) has allowed some valuable insights into how SMM’s operate within the realm of Instagram. SMM’s are in high demand and the space is growing at a rapid rate with a 1357% increase in social media positions listed on the platform (LinkedIn) since 2010 (Gotter, 2021). As explained in ‘niche, capishe?‘, this is one of the main reasons I wanted to delve into this niche along with it being an open platform to showcase my skills for a future career. Initially, I wanted to explore product photography along with SMM but I found they were mostly separate communities and thus, defeating the purpose of a niche study.
I then narrowed my focus to SMM and more specifically, how to develop a professional online persona to allow me to build my own persona within the niche through autoethnographic research which can be seen in the concept of mediatisation.
(Marshall, Barbour and Moore 2020 p2)
I explored how SMM’s demand authority and project expertise through their profiles’ personas through autoethnographic processes such as field notes. The purpose of the SMM niche is to gain authority as a leader in the space in order to attract clients that want to hire the services they offer. The use of Instagram over other platforms is a strategic choice for SMM’s as it allows potential clients and the community to have a quick overview of the personality of the persona behind a brand. This is through the design of the ‘feed’ and posts and the synergy they create which allows audience members to resonate with the professionalism projected and therefore allow you to be a leader in the field. The research I conducted about SMM within the community through participant observation allowed me to understand the innerworkings and strategies that exist ‘behind the scenes’ of creating a public persona. By using an autoethnographic approach to this niche, I was able to uncover some specific details about how SMM’s operate that I wouldn’t have uncovered if I hadn’t been an active participant within the niche over a period time. My Beta blog post shows more thoroughly the concept of persona and some of my interactions with the niche as an audience member.
Academic Research & Frameworks
By exploring my ideas around building professionalism through an online persona in my niche, both academic and popular sources have expanded my knowledge of autoethnography. It is important to acknowledge the frameworks that have shaped my understanding of autoethnography and that have informed the creation of content within my niche.
The persona is not the individual or collective but the negotiation between the two (Moore, 2021) where the dimensions interconnect to project a persona. The five dimensions of public persona are publicness, mediatisation, performativity, collectivity and value (Moore, 2021). The persona is neither entirely real or entirely fictional, it creates connections through an online space which results in a complex collective of networked connections within a niche that provides value (Moore, 2021). Different types of value can be taken from the persona however agency is the fundamental component which relates to the choices about how the online persona is presented (Moore, 2021).
Through the online persona I created through my Digital Artifact (DA), I used these dimensions to frame how I wanted the niche to perceive me as a SMM. The publicness dimension of my DA existed within the micro-public of SMM on Instagram where I used mediatisation through text, graphics, and curated content, to project my persona. The performativity dimension was used as I presented a persona that wasn’t entirely who I am behind the screen as I tried to portray myself more professionally, but still existed as myself in some ways. This was picked up by the collective through the algorithmic process and allowed for connections between my persona and others. In terms of value, my persona aims to inform others in the niche, particularly business owners who want to ‘level-up’ their social media skills. This boosts the prestige I am trying to create within the niche by having a reputation that is reliable and knowledgeable.
I used autoethnography to determine the field site to narrow my focus, gathered data using participant observation such as note taking and screenshots of my experience. I then identified a number of epiphanies that were most significant because epiphanies are important as it uses “personal experience to illustrate facets of cultural experience” (Ellis, et al. 2011) I then analysed this data by going outside the niche and exploring popular sources to find comparative analysis and arguments to my epiphanies.
This process was undertaken with ethical considerations such as the concept of reflexivity in mind which aims to uncover the researchers own bias’s when undergoing research. Another major contributing factor into my projection of persona was the concept of authenticity. “On social media, being authentic means getting personal and having personality; both of which come to signify ‘being real’ as opposed to putting up a façade or playing a (public) role”. Connecting with my audience regularly, showing my face on stories and the tone of voice I use in captions all creates a personality that the collective then picks up and interprets for themselves. However, I am curating this personality to be professional and personable through these practices on a weekly basis.
Reflection & Digital Artifact
Digital Artifact – @honeycreative_
chats with chels 