Skills to Learn Social Media Internship

[benternet]

is it a paid internship? It’s going to be tough to learn a lot yourself somewhere that has zero social foundation.

[Kopfi]

Set up SMART goals.

S = Specific. Set real numbers with real deadlines.

M = Measureable. Improving your writing skills is great, but not measureable.

A = Attainable. Work towards a goal that is challenging, but possible.

R = Realisitic. Be honest with yourself, what you know and the ressources available.

T = Time. Give yourself a deadline.

​

Goals for your internship could be reaching a benchmark number in leads, number of fans (wouldn’t advise it), impressions, reach, interactions with the community.

It could be a process that improves the companys way of work (e.g. a powerpoint master for monthly reportings).

Setting up and maintaining a company newsletter.

[FilmStew]

As someone who manages a media team/interns, I’ll give you my personal opinion and what I suggest.

Essentially all I want to see is that you keep asking questions and trying to learn more, sounds stupidly cliché, but due to the fact that social media is constantly changing, I want to see people constantly questioning and expanding their knowledge.

To be a little brutal here, 5-6 likes a post should not be the standard for someone offering an internship due to the fact that they most likely don’t have much of a clue on what they’re doing in the first place. Someone hiring for this should essentially be able to take a picture of their feet and get at least 20 likes.

[Junkstar]

Marketing and communications skills. Look into those and see what interests you.

[woodeenho]

If you’ve found a format that works on social media, bleed it dry to its very essence.

Never stop using something that’s still working.

[SaintMcCloud]

Hey congratulations! That’s awesome, my first internship was similar to yours in that there was little to no foundation for their social media at that point. Looking back on it some goals that would been nice to have would be

Overall Growth: Looking at it from a metrics perspective, set a goal for how many followers and average engagement per post you wanna have by the end of it. Doesn’t have to be super big cause you also don’t want to disappoint, just something to work towards. Also would be a good experience to familiarize yourself with the metrics and analytics of it all

Strategy: You should build a social media strategy because 1) It’ll help you so much in continuously creating new goals and focus your efforts 2) you can give that strategy to your company afterward so that they have a foundation going forward, which will make you look even better. Easy way to do this: ask them if they have any examples of staffing firm social media account that they wanna look like and work from there. If they can’t provide, find the most successful staffing firm social media accounts, see what works for them, and build from there.

Be creative: Social Media is super heavy on original content, so any kind of graphic design. video editing, or other digital content creation skills will make you super valuable going forward. Essentially you’ll be able to do the work of a whole team but you’ll be special because you’ll be designing it all for social media. This can be more of a personal goal but you can tell them you wanna make more original content for them.

I hope this helps, I know it’s hard working with people that don’t really understand social, but it also makes it that much sweeter when the work you independently did starts paying off.

[sdsquish]

Time management, multi tasking, project management, and copywriting. For goals, you could do something like:

Learn to set up projects in project management system in a way that can be replicated or automated, then by the end of the internship be able to set up each new project in less than 5 minutes.

Learn to batch tasks and understand how much time it takes for each task. This shows a clear understanding of your work and systems in place.

Set up Grammarly (free tool with a premium option) and see where your baseline of copywriting is. I.e. current score for grammar, accuracy, etc. Set a goal for improvement to reach by the end of your internship.

For an internship, it would be nuts for them to demand actual social media metrics from you. The whole point is for you to learn the skills you need to do it. The social media metric goals should be left to the employees managing them and getting paid appropriately to do so. Good luck!

[Elgebar]

As an in-house social media manager for a Fortune 500 company, 90% of my time and all of my productive work is the “making instagram, twitter, and facebook posts, and coming up with hashtags, captions, etc ” but an important skill in this industry is being able to make it sound grander than that. Some things to consider that will follow naturally from the productive work that you are doing:

-Identify upcoming trends/memes/social platforms that will be important to you and the firm in the future.

-Learn how to use analytics and social listening tools to improve engagement and other measurable outcomes.

– Form relationships with HR, advertising and other members of the marketing team to better integrate social media with other parts of the business (and start preparing yourself to be a marketing director/CMO kind of person).

[saskiabrielle]

Consider conversion. Are you trying to convert existing or new followers into customers? What are some things you could post to do that e.g. call to action and product demos on Instagram stories.

[abrumm94]

Hey if you don’t mind me asking, how did you obtain your internship? I am currently looking for an internship now and what you have described is actually kind of what I am looking for. Was it posted somewhere? Did you call them up and tell them you were looking for an internship? I just haven’t had much luck finding something I’m into, so any pointers are helpful!