Hanniffa Patterson – Teacher dot com

FROM an early age, Hanniffa Patterson wanted to change people’s thinking. At age 16 she began reaching out to children in her community, teaching them in the summer holidays and by 21 she was teaching at a preparatory school.

Now she’s a teacher cum social media researcher, who has worked in France and is studying social media trends.

“I was always very passionate about making change,” she tells All Woman.

“I got the opportunity to teach in France in 2005 and I met lots of great people,” she added, explaining that after returning to Jamaica an opportunity arose to extend her time in Paris to teach English.

There, she earned two master’s degrees while doing what she loved, a profession she has been in for 10 years.

Patterson decided to explore the area of communications at the graduate level while in Paris, and during her studies she fell in love with social media. And so, for the last seven years, she has studied how social media, especially Facebook, affects people’s lives, and how much the platform is changing the way people communicate and interact with each other all over the world.

“People are being hired, fired, and reconnecting with family because of Facebook,” she says.

“So I got interested in how this platform changed how people communicated and interacted. My first master’s degree is in information communications and it focused on Facebook and the digital identities people create on the site.”

Thereafter, she decided to do another master’s degree in intercultural communications, where she looked at how individuals evolve as people interculturally and how it is reflected on their Facebook pages.

She says while she never understood the great potential her studies had at the time, she began to realise their importance for businesses, and ventured into training smaller companies on how to leverage social media to build their brands.

“If you want to learn how to use social media in your business I can come in and train you, members of your staff, do an in-depth consultation session where I do an assessment of your company’s social media presence, as well as a strategy session to move forward,” she says.

“It’s an area that allows me to express all aspects of myself. I can be creative, interact with people, tap into my artistic skills, and it affords me the time to do the job from wherever I am through my website www.ouisocialmedia.com.”

Patterson is also part of the UNWomen iamwoman Empower Women campaign, geared at financially empowering women.

“It’s OK to go against the grain,” she advises other young women. “You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”