Interns and Social Media: by an Intern

This post is inspired by a post from a much wiser man than I, who has substantial more experience, Kyle Lacy. Anyway, I don’t want to dote on him, so I’ll move on to his post, “Do Not Leave Social Media to the Interns.”

As a former intern, I totally agree with this post and express the point of view of the intern who has said responsibility.

Now, I believe that it is more than possible for an intern to help manage a company’s social media strategy, the key word of that statement being “HELP”. I in past situations have run and/or controlled the social media of two different companies, the first was a smaller company in terms of social media presence and because they had less strict guidelines over what was being communicated to their audience, it was easier. I was able to easily align what I thought needed to be communicated to their audience with what the company’s personality was.

The second company was larger and much more difficult. When entering the position I was told to research the “best practices” on social media, which I did, referring to many different sites and blogs on internet marketing. With the information that I gathered I began to post what I saw as relevant comments on different social media sites. Many of the posts were relevant and relatable to the company and what it wanted to communicate to its audience…. And then there were some other posts… posts that some of the higher-ups didn’t quite believe aligned with the companies goals. Goals that didn’t exist in the best practices, documents that I was told to read… bummer I know.

SO… after all that rambling, my point is, if you are going to give your interns access to your social media accounts don’t refer them to a list of best practices and then spank them on the ass and tell them to hit the field. Instead, take control over your companies social media, delegate it to employees who have something invested in your company and know it inside and out.

And to you interns who have this responsibility slapped on you here is a tip. ASK what you should be posting…or use a tool that allows you to schedule your tweets a day in advance and then write them all out and have somebody (such as your boss) review them. If they seem too busy, then post something obscene and when they complain to you about it say something along the lines of “well I asked you to review them.”

There you have it, the honest opinion of a young professional who doesn’t know much. That last part about posting obscene things is a joke…. Kind of… no really it’s a joke.