Social Media Simternship

Over the course of this semester, my classmates and I completed an online simulation of a social media internship for our Principles of Social Media class. While it was a time-consuming assignment, it was a very fun and unique experience where I learned a lot. Throughout the simternship, we created organic social media posts, paid social media posts and scheduled influencers for the brand Buhi.

The first content we created was organic social media posts, which is content that is free to post, although certain types of media cost money. The content you posted could be anything from pictures, videos or memes to user generated content. Acting as the social media manager, I had to work with a budget to create posts on different social media platforms and decide what days and times to post them. At times, it took a while to come up with captions, or just figure out what I should post in general, but I kept getting better as the simternship went on.

The next content that I learned to create was paid social media posts. With paid social media posts, you have to not only decide what media to post with what caption on each platform, but you also need a post headline, call to action, a target audience that you create and you have to decide how much you want to spend on each post per day to promote it. This was more difficult because you had a budget of $5,000 to spread over six social media platforms. You really had to pay attention to which platforms were performing well and which platforms were not so you could assign your budget accordingly.

Lastly, we were given the task of hiring influencers to promote Buhi's products. You were given the choice of mega influencers, macro influencers and micro influencers and you could choose strategies like giveaways, social media takeovers, affiliate marketing, branded content, gifts and brand ambassadors. Obviously, mega influencers had the biggest following and a wider reach but they also cost more money to hire, where the micro influencers had less of a following but were cheaper to hire, so you could hire several. While it seemed easier and quicker to just hire the influencers, it was very difficult to decide which influencer or influencer combination would create the most revenue.

At the end of the simternship, you had to combine all three types of content with a budget of $5,000 still, so it was more difficult and time consuming. However, I really enjoyed it because it made you really focus on what platforms were performing well and what platforms weren't. Overall, it was a very fun and educational experience that I have never done anything like before. I definitely think this simulation will help anyone that is considering working in social media in the future.