Image by KoolShooters from Pexels

Apps

Instagram photography tips that will jumpstart engagement on your page

By Alex Harris

May 18, 2021

Email Facebook WhatsApp Twitter Flipboard

Copy Link

Social media is a great business marketing strategy to get your name around because of its reach. And between all social media platforms, Instagram is one of the best to go for. Did you know that posts on Instagram reach around 1.16 billion people on average? It’s also the social media platform that gathered the greatest number of new users last year, beating Facebook by an important margin.

Instagram’s user interface (UI) is built to place heavy emphasis on photos over text, so your best shot at getting noticed is by uploading great pictures. But how do you do that? Here are some tips that will boost your engagement on the app.

Exposure is the amount of light that gets absorbed by your camera’s sensor. The higher the exposure, the brighter the image. However, overly exposed photos tend to render incorrect colours, making your photos look almost unnatural. The extra brightness will also overshadow the details you want to emphasise. Therefore, always shoot your pictures a little darker. If you think your subject is too dark, you can always adjust the photo’s exposure during post-production.

Plus, post-production software like Adobe Photoshop and Apple Photos have more tools available than just those for exposure adjustments, so you can better edit your photos to your preferences.

If you want added control over your subject’s lighting, you’re going to need a reflector. It doesn’t have to be the expensive kind like the mylar and premium types. Simple glow reflectors like Neewer and Foleto Cardboard easily flecks light for below $30. Of course, you can also buy $10 foam boards from Utrecht and other stationers for a similar but weaker effect.

Reflectors are used in indoor shots and are set in the opposite direction of your main lights (whether that’s a dedicated studio light or an open window). Aim your reflector in your subject’s shadowy areas. This way, your photos are always evenly lit.

To take good pictures, you need a great camera. Of course, that’s not to say that you need a full-on DSLR camera. Instagram’s compression algorithm will always lower your photo’s quality down to 1080 x 1080 pixels the moment it exceeds that resolution. As such, a decent phone camera will do the trick. Today’s smartphones are built with multiple grids in their circuitry’s design, so their components are installed in places where the power flows more smoothly. This way, manufacturers can install high-functioning sensors, lenses, and other components—which usually demand more charge from the unit’s PCB.

For Instagram, a phone camera with at least 12 megapixels, like a Huawei Mate or an iPhone, is more than enough to meet the highest photo quality you can upload on the platform.

The right Instagram filter can produce dramatic effects, elevating your images’ aesthetic. For example, Breeze by Carmushka mutes part of the photo’s exposure, creating a moody atmosphere. Meanwhile, thaifurtado’s Blogger Presets can help make colours pop, making it a fantastic option for minimalist images.

 

Voir cette publication sur Instagram

 

Une publication partagée par Thainá Furtado (@thaifurtado)

However, if you overdo any of these filters, you’ll ruin your photos’ natural lighting. Fortunately, you can toggle the amount of filter you can apply to your pictures via slider (from 1 to 100 per cent). There’s no ideal percentage for this, just know that you need to stop once your pictures start looking unnatural.

The best Instagram photos aren’t taken without a bit of preparation, so make sure that you have the right tools before you get started. If you need some inspiration, you can always follow some of the best influencers on the platform—see what kind of photos they’ve posted to have amassed such a big following.

Image by Polina Tankilevitch from Pexels

Business

TikTok reveals new job listing and video resume features. How will it work for gen Z employees?

By Malavika Pradeep

May 18, 2021

Email Facebook WhatsApp Twitter Flipboard

Copy Link

Updates are an essential yet tricky responsibility apps have to undertake. While some bug fixes and improvements help apps stay relevant in the present times, others have the potential of redefining the platform altogether. Twitter, for example, announced its ‘Tip Jar’ feature in April, which allows users to tip favourite creators for their tweets. Although the feature was being tested to help creators monetise on the platform, the move has earned Twitter the label of being the “new OnlyFans.”

The latest on the list with its own set of updates seems to be TikTok—with a job listing and video resume feature all set to redefine the platform. Will it be for the better or worse? And will it actually end up being beneficial for young users on the hunt for creative jobs? Let’s dig in.

TikTok’s upcoming recruitment features seek to bridge the gap between participating companies and interested applicants. The pilot programme will provide users with ready access to job openings while offering companies a channel to recruit gen Zers into their workforce.

Primarily featuring entry-level jobs, the platform will let users apply by submitting a video resume rather than a traditional application. This video will act as an elevator pitch where users can creatively edit and summarise their work experience for the hiring company to review. While these pitches are shared privately with the company by default, TikTok will also prompt users to post them onto their profile to help publicise the new service.

Apart from this cross-posting prompt, however, the entire recruitment business—along with all of its features—will be kept off the core TikTok app. The platform will instead offer a dedicated webpage for job listings and applications, which will be accessed via the app. So, you sadly won’t get to witness a user Bussin’ it right after a mini Ted Talk about their work experience.

According to Axios, TikTok is currently beta testing the service with a group of companies, with several others in the talks about participating including various sports leagues.

On 14 January 2021, the recruitment team at °1824 promoted an open role at the company through a TikTok video, inviting viewers to apply. However, the recruitment process had a jarring twist. Interested candidates had to apply using the hashtag #1824Next with a video showcasing why they were a good fit for the team. Similarly, HBO amassed more than 300 applications for a summer internship using the hashtag #HBOMaxsummerintern. With more than 10.5 million and 2.4 million views on the respective hashtags to date, °1824 and HBO essentially signalled the onset of a new generation of recruitment channels via TikTok.

The overlap of careers with TikTok, however, isn’t a new frontier of job recruitments. According to ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that owns TikTok, #careeradvice gained serious momentum in the first few months of 2021—growing to more than 80 million views per day by mid-February. The popular hashtag features tons of ‘career babes’ sharing tips for landing internships, acing job interviews and improving resumes.

In March 2021, The Washington Post went as far as declaring TikTok to be a “fast-emerging force in the job search ecosystem at a time when unemployment remains high, a new generation looks for their first jobs and pandemic isolation leads to hours of mindless scrolling.” The publication further highlighted the company’s efforts in cultivating career-related videos along with other how-to content areas such as financial advice, skills and home DIYs. TikTok also announced a $50 million Creator Fund last year, in support of educational content creators.

“We want people to turn to TikTok not just for entertainment, but to learn something new—to acquire a new skill or simply get inspired to do something they’ve never done before,” TikTok wrote in a blog post in June 2020, embarking on an interesting evolution by leveraging its heritage of entertainment to make the platform more useful to the lives of its users. “People are already doing this, and it’s a trend we want to get behind and accelerate,” the company added.

This shift, however, isn’t free of hiccups. If a company chooses to recruit via TikTok, as °1824 did with its call out, critics expect various biases to come into play. “If your skin is a different colour or English isn’t your first language, those are potential areas that companies can discriminate on,” said Natasha Makovora, a recruitment marketing specialist at The Employer Brand Shop. In an interview with Rewire, Makovora highlighted how this would be an important consideration although various organisations are being trained on unconscious bias and racism.

Another con, in this case, would be users losing out on opportunities over ‘unprofessional’ posts in case the employers decide to snoop into their public TikTok accounts. It may be worth setting up a secondary account for professional purposes only on TikTok—there goes a piece of advice you probably never thought you’d hear before.

Although the upcoming features in this regard render TikTok as a dubious pioneer of the next generation of recruitment, let’s not forget how 62 per cent of TikTok users are gen Zers who spend an average of 52 minutes per day on the platform. With video resumes offering the epitome of relatability on a video-first entertainment platform, TikTok might just prove to be a great way for brands to reach the demographic they’re increasingly looking to hire. And with new trends in the making as we speak, I bet witnessing gen Z pitching themselves to a recruiter on TikTok will be as entertaining as the content we currently watch on the app.