By MAYA FEE

First-year Monash student Jemima Hartley has already landed her first job as a social media consultant for a media company.

“I’m in charge of monitoring the company’s social media accounts and control the content that we present on those platforms,” said Ms Hartley, who works for Merge Media.

“Our main clients that we advertise for are retirement homes and villages.”

Ms Hartley, who is an Arts student doing a media major, started off as an intern for Merge Media, but was quickly hired as a paid employee.

“A lot of people I know think that Facebook is stalking them with an algorithm because they see ads that are relevant to their lifestyles, but these ads are put in their feeds on purpose by people in jobs like myself,” she said.

“If people click on an ad for our company, we call that a ‘conversion’,” Ms Hartley said.

“I monitor the conversions, and that information helps me when I am inserting ads into people’s social media feeds.”

“I use a program called Ad Manager, where I put in information such as age range, distance and gender that the target demographic would be for the retirement homes,” she said.

“For the retirement village I’m currently working with, I set the age range to 65+, both genders and 10km all around the location of the home.”

Ms Hartley said reaching a target audience for a specific advertisement was an extensive process, but was proving to be a successful and economic way of advertising.

“If the ad planting is successful, I can reach up to 170,000 in the target demographic using one ad,” Ms Hartley said.

“A lot of older people use Facebook these days too, which is my target audience.”