How to Engage your Interns With Social Media Management

At this point we’ve all heard the benefits of having a strong social media presence

• It’s a great place to attract customers, get feedback, and generally see them in the wild.
• It can be another avenue for developing your brand persona as well as for giving announcements.
• You can use it as another HR channel for recruiting staff.
• You can use it as a way to post content and increase your search engine ranking.
• You can keep an eye on what your competitors are up to every day.

In fact, according to Statista in 2017, over 30% of execs interviewed said they perceived having a mid-level ROI from social media and a further 20%+ perceived a high ROI.

We also know that creating a consistent content pipeline is key to effective engagement on social media. Algorithms across most platforms like LinkedIn or Instagram are geared towards making the accounts that have the most original and regular content jump to the top of the feed.

However, creating a steady stream of new content can seem daunting, especially for a small team. Is it worth hiring a dedicated content designer / videographer / social media specialist when you are unsure of the ROI?

But you don’t need to hire a special team to make great content. Especially with cell phones becoming common, social media content is something anyone can create. And a great candidate for free content is your internship program.

How can you get social media content out of your internship program?

If there’s anyone at an office who should be excited about working, it’s interns. They’re just getting started on their career and finally have a chance to show their stuff in your office.

Interns can be great candidates for showcasing your company in a fresh light. They also probably can shoot a halfway decent video on their phone camera.

One way you can add a little pizzazz to your internship program is by encouraging your interns to shoot a bit of video footage. Stress that it doesn’t have to be super high-production or scripted. It can be about anything from day to day life on the job or various projects they are working on.

Not only can it be a fun change of pace (and a great job skill for them to learn), this kind of content is gold for HR when they are looking to hire.

So how do you get interns to buy in?

Help your interns make a social media plan

New workers can have difficulty defining their own rate of work. Especially when managing interns you need to give clear deliverables.  It’s difficult to quantify things like post engagement and quality, but you can easily quantify post frequency and type.

Give them some hard numbers that they can agree on and hold them to it. Say 2-3 short videos per week and one long video per month.
 
A Sample social media content plan for an intern.

Plans like the one above don’t look like much, but they can give you a huge repository of content you can use and repurpose every year.

Finally, make it fun. If you’re working with a team of interns, turn it into a competition. Give the intern with the best engagement for the week lunch on the company one day. 

How to run social media for your business

If you’re like many businesses, you may find it difficult to know where to begin on social media. You may have even tried to have interns take on the task with varying degrees of success.

It’s easy to think, “interns are young and love social media, I’ll just tell them to have at it.”  But just because someone uses social media doesn’t necessarily mean they’re ready to run it for your company.

You may want to consider hiring a dedicated social media manager. Someone who can take ownership of social as their deliverable.

You may want to hire an intern that already specializes in social media. By using our service at Virtual Internships, we can connect you with specialized interns around the world who can get your social media strategy moving fast. With zero fees for your business to participate.

Once you have someone dedicated to social media, then you can coordinate with staff like interns to bring it online with great content.

Interested in learning more about our remote internship program? Head over to our website and leave an email and we’ll be happy to discuss further.