A Day in the Life of a Social Media Intern

When I heard that Portent was looking for a full-time social media intern, my first thought was, “What in the world could a social media intern do that could possibly take a whole days’ worth of work?”  To be completely honest, and I know this goes for pretty much every other recent college grad and/or parent when I say this, I thought all a social media position entailed was posting content about the company in a very low level, simple way.  My idea of someone who ran social media for a company was of a person posting material at home, in a bed, and taking a total of about 30 minutes a day to do it.

What I have come to learn over my first month working at Portent is that I was completely wrong.  There is so much more to it than that. The digital marketing world is huge, ever-changing, ever-updating, and therefore always has something new to be learned.  I am fortunate enough to learn not just about social media but PPC, SEO, content strategizing, and more. (I also had absolutely no idea what those terms meant about 3 months ago).

Every morning when I come into work the first thing I do is check Portent’s social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.  For those of you who have never managed a business page on Facebook before, let me tell you, there is a whole other Facebook world out there that exists beyond your knowing.  If I come out of this remembering one thing, it’s that our computers know EVERYTHING about us. No joke, it’s almost creepy.  I can create posts and advertisements that are directed to exactly the type of person I want it going out to.  Facebook also has an algorithm that causes a business’s ad to be restricted from even your followers’ newsfeeds so that any one person doesn’t get too many ads popping up throughout a day.  To overcome this, Facebook makes you pay for your ad to be seen by more people.  I can choose the type of person I want to see my ad and tailor it to exactly the way I think those people will want to see it.  The end goal is different for each business.  Some want sales, others want website clicks or page likes.  It all depends on the type of product a company offers.  There are even websites that allow you to create your posts for the week and will automatically send them out when you set it to do so.  That way, you don’t have to technically post every single day, multiple times a day. Mind = blown.  Now for those of you who aren’t new to the digital marketing world I understand I probably sound a little too excited for my own good, but for those of us out there who didn’t know these type of things existed, it’s pretty cool.

Now, how do I use my knowledge base to figure this all out? I spend a chunk of my day looking at the analytics behind each post.  This includes things like page and post likes, impression rate, engagement rate (likes, shares, comments), the type of image used, what type of people were targeted, the time the post went out, and so on.  I have to pull all of this information together and see what makes a post succeed or fail and why.  I compare these stats by week, month, and year and decide whether or not the company is benefiting from its time and money spent on social media.  If they are not, it then becomes a question of what can we do to make this more successful?

So see, there is a lot more to it than you thought, right? Every day I am learning more and more about the ins and outs of paid online advertising.  So for those of you who ever questioned the legitimacy of a social media job, just know it’s not as #basic as one may think.