An Intern’s Perspective: More Than Just a Degree
When people talk about college experience, they often refer to the after-hour partying that they take part in. However, my college experiences have been the knowledge and abilities that I obtained through relationships with professors and most of all my internships. Prior to starting my freshman year of college at Lynn University in Boca Raton, FL, I was told that a company looks for three things when hiring a recent graduate:
- An education (this is fairly obvious)
- An internship
- An experience outside the usual; for instance, a semester abroad.
I was also told that because every one was looking for this in their future employee, the best way to stand out was to do more. For example, instead of doing one internship, do two. So, here I am, sitting at my desk at Simply180, a marketing agency in Boca Raton, in the process of completing my second internship.
Why Simply180?
Wondering why I chose to complete my second internship at Simply180? Well, it’s a relatively young digital marketing agency in the center of Boca Raton (exactly five minutes away from campus and five minutes away from my apartment). The close proximity wasn’t the only reason I picked up the phone and called to see if they were accepting resumes for interns. Learning about the services this company offered and their values being based on simplicity was enough reason for me to pick up the phone. Taking on this internship meant I was going to get a chance to learn the behind the scenes of all these services, such as branding, marketing, content development, and all the research/analytics that comes with it. I’m 21-years-old, how am I supposed to know what I want to do with the rest of my life? Well, it’s been one month of interning at Simply180 and I already have a better understanding of my own interest because of it.
BTS of Social Media Marketing
So what exactly does BTS or “behind the scenes” of social media marketing entail? The hands-on social media work I’ve been doing includes a number of things:
- Using social media analytics tools to see the type of content a client’s target audience engages with across several social media platforms
- Curating and creating social media posts
- Scheduling the posts
- Keeping up with said posts and community engagement
- Monitoring fan/follower responses to our posts per platform
Throughout the first month of my internship I have been tasked to create social media posts for a few of Simply180’s clients and Simply180 itself. If you think that being twenty-one and growing up with social media since I can remember would make this task easy, you’re wrong. When using any platform of social media for yourself it’s simple; you post what you like and that’s it. When using social media to market a company, you need to focus your post on what will grab your audience’s attention and keep inline with the values of your company. Social media for an individual is about what that individual likes and of course, how many likes or favorites your post will get. On the other hand, for a company, likes and favorites are important, but other aspects such as consistency and engagement with your fan base are equally as important. Social media is used to update customers, engage with customers, and attract more customers. To make the most of the client’s social media presence, we post to all platforms we feel fit. For example, for Simply180 itself we post to, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+. In order to schedule and keep track of the curated posts, we use platforms such as Hootsuite and Hubspot. These platforms allow us to schedule posts months in advance with a set time and date. Not only do these programs allow us to schedule, but also track the engagement following these posts.
One Month Down, Two to Go
Like I said, throughout my first month of my internship I have been tasked with creating social media content for Simply180 and one of our clients, based on an existing strategy and under the supervision of an account manager. I am slowly getting the hang of it, but there is so much more to marketing than social media. I am interested in learning about the research and the analytics process – what good is the content we post if we don’t know what our target market is looking for? On the other hand, I’d like to learn more about brand development as well. I believe the brand development process is extremely important. It involves taking an idea or business and creating something appealing out of it. In my opinion, there are so many great ideas that don’t make it past the idea stage without the right branding, causing the business to lose momentum and not succeed to its potential.
I can confidently say, I am learning from the best. I came across Simply180’s social media before their company website. What I saw on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter brought me to their website, which lead me to a call-to-action and picking up the phone to apply for this internship.
Are you interested in becoming an intern at Simply180? Click here to learn more and apply.
