When searching for an internship in the field of communications, I did not really have a preference. As I did not do a lot of internships before I was basically interested in trying out anything from the field for some time. However, one specific topic area seemed to come up again and again when doing some research: an internship as a social media manager. After looking up typical tasks and daily routines of a social media manager I was convinced and applied to a few marketing and social media agencies. Three months later I started my internship at Typhoon hospitality.
Typhoon is a 360 degrees marketing and PR agency that focuses on marketing for hotels and restaurants. On my first day I was assigned a supervisor and together with my supervisor a few clients that I would be responsible for in my time as an intern. The first things I learned, and which later proved to be the basis of social media management, was community managent. Community management basically means taking care of the community or the followers of your account. This included, answering all comments or direct messages, liking and commenting on all tagged posts and trying to get people to engage by commenting on relevant posts. As a rule of thumb this is done twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. Given that I had eight different clients, which had relatively many followers and interaction, I was busy with community management about two hours per day. Once I was shown some more things and got accostumed to my internship and the connected tasks, things such as searching for pictures in databases and setting up monthly plans of what to post were part of my daily tasks. The focus hereby was laid on Instagram and Facebook. As I had 8 clients and per social network about 9 photos per months had to be posted, this took quite some time, as the same pictures could also not be posted several times. After adding all the found pictures to the planning, captions had to be written for all of them. This was quite a fun task, as I could get quite creative with the captions. However, it could also be challenging sometimes as I naturally sometimes ran out of fun ideas. Another task that reappearded every end of the month was the writing of monthly reportings for the clients. These reportings consisted of performance reports from social media accounts and specific posts. The most fun task that I got to experience was the shooting of content. As most of the clients were restaurants, this literally meant doing foodshoots at the locations and after being able to eat all of the food.
When you read all of this, which pretty much summarized all the tasks I had to fullfill during my time as an intern, you must think but where is the social in all of this?! (At least I think that). I am not saying that my internship and what I have learned was boring. Really not at all! I am happy I got to learn everything that I did and also now more than ever realize the increasing importance of social media and online marketing. However, I did not expext social media management to be as theoretical as it in the end was. Of course this was also partly due to covid-19 as we could also no longer have client meetings etc.. Still, there was also no real life interaction with people and how I experienced it, it turned out to be quiet a dry, stuck behind the laptop all day job.
My advice to you, if you also want to do an internship in that field would be to try to combine several areas in your internship. For me personally, the repetetiveness of what I did just sadly made it boring after some time. Therefore, I would have not minded at all to be busy with social media management half of the week and maybe try out something like PR the other half of the week.