There is a great demand for Social Media managers, but many companies cannot afford or don’t want to budget for this position and hire an intern.
An intern can bring energy, excitement and a new prospective to a social media marketing campaign. Does this mean that a company should put an intern in charge of marketing their brand within the social media realm?
This is a great debate going on among many companies whether they should hire an intern to manage social media or a paid staff. There are many schools of thought when it comes to this question.
According to a blog post from Nick Stamoulis:
“Your social media marketing manager should be someone who is invested in the long-term success and brand building of your company. Interns are going to come and go and every new intern will have to be trained from scratch. This means your social media marketing will always be stopping and starting and won’t develop and grow as a campaign.”
In a blog from BlueGlass titled” Should You Hire a Social Media Intern”, they advise :
“Don’t rely on an intern to build your social media profiles.If you haven’t yet dipped a toe into the social media pool, don’t have an intern shove you in headfirst and then abandon you when he realizes you can’t swim. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you still won’t know what you’re doing once that intern leaves and takes all of his social media knowledge with him…and that’s in the best-case scenario. At the very worst, you could be giving an intern the keys to your social media ride, only to see him immediately crash it into a tree. Are you going to trust someone who’s only around temporarily and probably isn’t getting paid with the integrity of your brand?”
From this school of thought, an intern can assist a Marketing Director with posting content or daily monitoring, but the company should have a clear vision, strategy and Social media policy established prior to hiring a social media intern.
In a blog post from Socialfish who consult on building capacity internally for organizations to manage the work of social media, they support hiring an intern for social media management.
“One of the things we’ve discovered over the last two years of doing a lot of this hiring help is that we can officially call BS on the idea that you shouldn’t hire an intern to do your social media management work.
Because here’s the truth… A lot of this work is very administrative. Monitoring can be very tedious. It’s time-consuming, especially at the beginning. It takes a lot of organization. It takes a lot of time and effort to set up internal processes that make workflow, well, flow. We hear of plenty of executive -level people who just aren’t prepared to do the admin stuff – which is 95% of it. But smart interns will know to use those organizing skills to absorb and learn as much as they can about the inner workings of the business.”
So should you hire intern for social media?
The bottom line is there is no perfect answer. Companies can gain very valuable insight and help from hiring an intern to manage their social media. Any company who is entering the social media world should have a clear strategic vision as to how they are using these channels and if they choose to hire an intern, a mentor who can train and manage.
Comments