Guest post by Justin Lee
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of reading a guest post by Nick Stamoulis here on WeBlogBetter titled Should You Let An Intern Manage Your Social Media Marketing?
In the article Mr. Stamoulis summizes that the cons of hiring an intern to “handle” your social media marketing (he cites “Flake” factor, limited experience, and no long term commitment to your company) far outweigh the pros (being comfortable with social media and cheap labor).
Mr. Stamoulis then goes on to suggest that the best person to handle your social media marketing could be anyone in your marketing department: specifically your PR person, in-house SEO expert, or your copywriter.
I’m not sure about many readers of this blog, but my company doesn’t have any of those people on staff. I’m the copywriter, my business partner does the PR, and we split the SEO duties.
By assuming that our readers have those 3 positions inside their marketing department, why wouldn’t they have a social media manager as well?
Mr Stamoulis’s advice is perfect for a medium or large sized company that as has all 3 job functions; but then again, a company with those 3 positions (especially an “in-house SEO expert”) should have the payroll & resources to hire a full time social media manager. (As a side note, I’d love to find a company that has their own full time in-house SEO expert but no social media manager).
What Mr. Stamoulis fails to recognize is that the majority of businesses today don’t have these types of resources. Furthermore, after reading many of the great posts and comments on WeBlogBetter, it seems to me as though the blog is geared towards helping small business owners and bloggers be more successful.
How many of those people have the 3 staff members (in house SEO expert, PR team and copywriter) on staff full time? I suspect very few.
In a perfect world, social media would be handled by the owner of the company, because they have the ultimate voice and vision of the business. But that’s not always going to be possible.
So I’ll turn this post around and provide you with ideas on how interns can actually be positive contributors to your social media efforts.
1. Bring your intern along slowly: I would hope that no one would turn over their Twitter account or Facebook Fanpage administration to their brand new intern. Make sure that your intern understands your niche, your business, your target audience, your products & services, and your corporate culture & messaging. Once they do, then you can start to assign them specific tasks to help you grow your social media platform.
2. Have you intern start a “clipping” service. We’ll have a social media intern start out by signing up for Google Alerts. We’ll have them pick the top keywords in our industry, along with our company name, and our domain name. This allows us to not only monitor what’s being said about our company and our website, but also allows us to read great content and articles in our niche, which make for perfect “Tweets.” This allows the intern to quickly learn about our company, our industry and current events surrounding our industry.
3. Speaking of Twitter, now that our social media intern is finding great content for us to share with our followers, we want them focused on building our followers, increasing our interaction & growing our reach on Twitter. This includes finding new followers, monitoring Twitter for real time conversations that we want to contribute to, monitoring @ replies, and “Re-Tweeting” other helpful/useful content.
4. On YouTube, a social network in its own right, our interns make sure that our videos are properly optimized (video SEO) with correct titles, descriptions, and tags. Our interns also focus on getting more video & channel views, more subscribers, and also adding friends on YouTube (all of which factor into YouTube’s algorithm and help push your videos higher in the SERPs). And if you’re not already doing any video marketing, what better project to assign to your social media intern then to create some videos for your company?
5. For Facebook, your intern can review the daily clips with someone on your team, and post those to your Fanpage. They can also login to your Fanpage and “like” other companies that you want to do business with, or are partners with, and engage them on social media with positive commentary. This will allow your Fanpage to appear on those other Fanpages, and is a great way to get more fans yourself.
6. Searching Linkedin groups is another activity that our social media interns engage in. They monitor groups and alert us when a discussion is taking place where our commentary can further position us as experts in our field. Linkedin has also recently introduced “company status updates” to rival what Twitter is doing. Are you using this tool? It’s the perfect activity for your social media intern to engage in.
Those are just a few of the many things that an intern can do to help your social media marketing efforts. I was both surprised & disappointed by the many of the comments after Mr. Stamoulis wrote his post. Many of them felt that interns weren’t reliable or trustworthy, or had no vested interest in the company’s success.
I don’t see how an intern is any different than any other non-equity employee working at a business. Your “in-house SEO” or PR team is just as likely to become disgruntled with your company as your intern, and become irresponsible on social media.
All of the interns that we’ve hired to date have been reliable, trustworthy, and honest. They know if something is debatable in terms of being posted on a social media account, it’s better for them to be cautious and not post. A lot of how your intern acts is a direct correlation to how well they’re managed and what direction they’re given.
In closing, I’d suggest that people look at just a few of the tasks I’ve suggested above that make for great intern projects and ask yourself “am I doing that in my own social media efforts?” If you are, or you have a staff large enough to delegate those tasks to, then that’s fantastic. But as I assumed earlier, most readers of this blog (small business owners) probably aren’t, and therefore could really benefit from having a social media intern.
Hiring a social media intern doesn’t mean giving them complete control of your social media “voice” online. It can, however, help you grow your reach in social media; and by allowing your intern to evolve, you might even find your next social media manager.
Justin Lee is the CEO & Co-Founder of Efficient Enterprises, Inc & Intern Profits. Intern Profits helps business owners find, hire & mange interns to help them grow their business faster than they ever thought possible.
About Kiesha Easley
Your tips as really effective to use by interns in social media marketing efforts.Thank you for giving this kind of information.God bless you.
KateW81 recently posted..1300 numbers in Australia
Hey there,
Great looking tips! We really could use them for this purpose but it depends on how much we trust them to manage our networking profiles and his/her capabilities. Because I’m sure not everyone would be open to just letting anyone manage their social medias for them. It’s a very important aspect of business, it only takes one wrong move to screw everything up.
Gary Ashton recently posted..Diana Giles Makes New Clients in Nashville on VFD
Having a intern for your company is a great way to look for a manager position that later on. I am really going to tattoo this part into my memory, ” don’t let them be your online voice.” great information and than you for sharing.
Your previous post about the intern social media marketing provided a great insight. This one too. :)
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I am still not sure about an intern as this is the person who doesn’t work for the company full time and that’s why not interested in good results. you are really lucky if you get a really good intern. I agree with the points that you have discussed, but still they can’t persuade me.
Thanks for the article. I think interns are good. They can help in the workload in the office.
Twitter: GearOutdoor
says:
Great post Justin. Here are some really useful and helpful tips. The Internet huge and global; it has enormous potential to create and develop blogging, internet marketing and social media. Your post helped me understand some areas that I was a little confused such as research tools and specifically Linkedin. I figured now out that Linkedin is not only a research tool for finding clients, but also a business tool to meet and communicate people.
Nick recently posted..Osprey Atmos Backpack Review and Coupons
Thanks to share how effectively to use interns in social media marketing. But i just confused both between the previous post of Stamoulis.
Intern may be helpful to your business but don’t let them do all the work meaning they also
need your guide and train them the way you want the business flow.
Twitter: ForteProperties
says:
Is there an echo in here??… :D
Hiring a social media intern is an excellent idea if they follow the above steps. Like it says… don’t let them be your online voice. I especially like the idea of setting up Google Alerts to see what people are saying about your company etc. I think i’m going to do that myself to see what turns up. Great post! Unfortunately i don’t think my business is big enough to hire an intern just yet. :)
Chris recently posted..Forte Properties: The Best Austin Owner Finance Service
Interns can, in fact, be very helpful in the work environment. I’m surprised people don’t invest more energy in actually training them with skills that may benefit the company in the long run. great post.
BlondeBomber recently posted..Best Cupcakes Ever updated Tue Nov 8 2011 12:06 pm CST
Well, most of companies just afraid to invest in interns. They think what if… But they make a great mistake, to my mind. I think in a year or two this practice will be widely spread.
This is a really great topic..I learned a couple of things on this post, and I’ll be willing to try it out. There’s so many things you can do in social media nowadays.
sandraw2580 recently posted..Motivation To Lose Weight
Twitter: bbrian017
says:
Hi Justin, I think if you train the intern like you train any other employees they should be able to do a good job with your social media Brand. I personally think social media marketing is easy but again I have 4 years’ experience. For someone just graduating or just learning about a business perhaps it’s not a good job for them. I think the most appropriate person would be an employee that fully understand the true vision of the company and can represent that image the best.
bbrian017 recently posted..Syndicate Your Content and Engage with Bloggers
Hey Kiesha,
Thanks for inspiring me, I’m reading a lot of useful posts in your blog!
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Twitter: ditesco
says:
I love this type of posts and I agree that WeBlogBetter’s audience is geared towards small businesses and for that matter bloggers who want to learn the ropes about how things can be done properly. Obviously, if one has the funding and resources to be fully staffed, it is better, but I have learned that despite this, it is not always the case. In my opinion, the most important aspect that you mention is “A lot of how your intern acts is a direct correlation to how well they’re managed and what direction they’re given”. This holds true for just about anything, staff included (SMM). Great advise!
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It will provide you ideas on how interns can actually be positive. Great to hear how to effectively use interns in your social media marketing efforts information on here. Thanks a lot for sharing your post on here :)
Kavya Hari recently posted..Amazing News For Webmasters!
Hiring a social media intern doesn’t mean giving them complete control of your social media “voice” online. It can, however, help you grow your reach in social media; and by allowing your intern to evolve, you might even find your next social media manager.
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