If you are looking to get a social media internship, there are a few things that you need to remember before hitting send. There is no denying the fact that most aren’t coming into the social media field with a degree in social media management. Until such college degree exists, here are five things to avoid when applying for an internship in social media or digital communications:
- Learn how to set privacy settings on Facebook and use them! Your obnoxious party pictures from college are great to share with your friends but your future employers do not want to see them even people in the social media field. Before you send your resume and a direct link to your Facebook make sure you have filtered through those pictures and status updates.
- Triple check any material you send when applying for a job. The bar is set higher for anyone in communications, let alone someone applying for an online focused position. If you have typos, grammatical errors, use the wrong name/title, have a million attachments or forget a subject line in an email, it could eliminate you from consideration.
- Read! Don’t just do research on a company when it comes time to interview for a job. Read all the industry papers and websites, agency blogs, and personal blogs kept by employees for the inside track on overall trends and industry direction.
- Attitude accounts for a lot. Simply bringing a positive, can-do attitude to the table will set you apart. We know that not everyone has a background in social media for brands but having the attitude to learn is important to be successful.
- Don’t answer the question ‘why do you want an internship in social media’ with because I am on Facebook all the time. Just because you have been on Facebook since middle school and you have a Facebook Timeline to show for it does not mean you already have the skill set. The beauty of social media is learning and researching the broad range of platforms, dashboards and social networking sites out there. Surprisingly enough as a social media intern you will be doing A LOT of other tasks and the majority of them do not involve Facebook.