Should Social Media Be Handled By an Intern?
Should an intern be handling your social media? The long and short answer is no. I’ve worked with plenty of interns in my 12+ years in the professional world. Some have been great and some were less than stellar. With interns, you can never be sure of what you’re going to get or how fast they are going to burn out. While college-aged interns may be comfortable using social media than some of your other employees, you should not be putting something so important and valuable as your social media marketing in the hands of an intern.
Here are 3 reasons interns should not be in charge of your company’s social media:
Flake factor
Most interns are working for free. And while you may hide that fact behind the smoke and mirrors of “resume building,” it doesn’t change the fact that you aren’t paying them to be there. This usually means that the internship will come second to school and side-jobs that actually do pay. I’m not saying all interns are flakes that fail to show up on day two, but you have to remember that your company is not high on their priority list right now, “resume building” or not. Social media marketing requires constant attention and daily updates to be most effective. Commitment is crucial! Most social media marketing campaigns fail because a company didn’t give it the long term attention it needed to grow. You can’t afford to miss 3 out of 5 days in a week because the intern didn’t show. 
Limited experience
The reason they are your intern and not a full-time employee is because they don’t have the experience or training yet to be a full-time employee. They are coming to you and your company to learn and grow and get real-hands on experience in their given field. This means they are going to make mistakes (part of the learning curve); do you want your social media reputation to be the mistake? A carefully built up online reputation can come crashing down around your ears in a matter of hours with one wrong social media step. When you think about all the social media mistakes professionals can make, what could potentially happen with an untrained intern?
No long term commitment to your company
While every intern is tempted by the idea that they might actually get hired after interning for you for six months, most understand and accept that it’s a slim possibility. If someone doesn’t have a long term commitment to your company, chances are they won’t fully understand your business goals and messaging in the short time that they are there. In order to do social media marketing “right” you have to know what you are trying to accomplish, what you want to say and who you are talking to.
7 Responses to “Should Social Media Be Handled By an Intern?”
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Nick, I don’t think I’d want to put an intern “in charge” of anything that might involve brand presentation. Nor would I want a VP tweet all day.There is plenty of hands of work that an intern can do with a little training and at low costs to help a SM campaign–research, lists, posts, etc.
Leaving an intern alone to do all the work is like gambling with you company’s reputation. Not saying that there is no creative fast-thinking young people out there but social media requires a min. of business / industry knowledge associated with some marketing skills. The best way of using an intern properly would be giving him/her some guidelines, and before anything gets published on the web must get approved by someone responsible for the PR of the company: Pres, CEO, VP, manager, etc.. If the intern is not serious, you’ll know pretty soon, and better move on to someone who are willing to learn this with your company. That’s right! Interns might not put your company as priority due to low or no pay. However if they accepted the job is because they were willing to learn something new and exciting! And perhaps take this amazing social media experience to the next level. Not only that, but also the person responsible for the intern will learn what’s more appropriate for their own business through the experience they’ll have with either either, their own or an external marketing company. Peace out!
I believe that since interns do not have any long term commitment to the company, they do not feel responsible to any act whose repercussions are in the future and this affects their current actions. Thus they should not be left to handle such vital matters which are material to the company’s corporate image.
I respectively agree & disagree with some points in your post Nick.
I believe that an Intern can “Handle your Social Media” if you structure the roles right from the start of the Internship.
If the subject matter experts do the content creation, and the Intern builds and manages the channel it can be effective, save hours of time, and save money for your organization.
I was an Intern at a technology company last summer. As an intern I helped launch their YouTube Channel, Twitter, Facebook Business Page, LinkedIn business page and Flickr. These Social Media assets now have top 10 rankings for their target keywords
The YouTube videos also rank for some competitive, non brand keywords that are proven to pull leads based on the Google Analytics Goals I setup from scratch to track PPC & Social Media performance.
I also helped the Sales team with their LinkedIn Profiles, and held company training to teach them how to use LinkedIn Groups to drive traffic to the website.
That said, I did not handle the content creation. As an Intern I needed help creating the CONTENT of the Social Media assets because I don’t have the years of industry knowledge and intimate knowledge of the businesses’ brand.
I strongly agree that the Intern should never be the “Voice” of your brand. Your customers don’t want to hear from the Intern, they want to hear from the “Experts” of the business.
Unfortunately the experts don’t always realize the value of SM, don’t know how to use the tools, and frankly don’t have time to manage these channels.
In my opinion, the most effective strategy is to get the Experts to create the content and the Intern to actually handle the day to day monkey work of the Social Media channel. This includes creating the channel, posting the “experts” content, optimizing the content, and sharing the Social Media pages and posts through Social bookmarking.
Cheers,
Nigel
Some good points for sure. But let’s not ignore some of the advantages of someone that is intimately familiar with these new marketing tools. They already eat, sleep, and breathe the tools, and are usually better versed on them than anyone presently in your company. Having them as a member on a Social media team can be quite valuable.
Social media experts come in all forms, and many of the best ones out there don’t have the traditional business degree with a marketing background. Community building isn’t an exact science, so it can’t really be ‘taught’. The best thing I can equate it to is hosting a good party with a business spin on it.
I agree. You wouldn’t give the keys to your sports car to someone who just got their driver’s license, let alone a learner’s permit, unless you were in the car to supervise. By the same token you shouldn’t give the keys to your online reputation to someone in college or an intern without providing clear guidance and then carefully monitoring their activity. What they might see as something worth posting could come back to bite.
I’m a big fan of interns and nurturing young talent. Providing a mentoring opportunity for an intern to learn creates a valuable experience for both the student and the mentor. Here is a recent blog post I wrote to share some ways students can creating-luck.com/2011/12/02/find-a-mentor-using-social-media find mentors using LinkedIn.
I had an exceptional intern last year, wow, she was great, now works for DELL. However, as a team we would have been great but I would feel a bit off letting her run the whole thing. I can mix 27 years of experience in the business with my Social expertise, so working wither her would be great, but I do feel some business awareness is needed