During the first week of your internship, you might now have a lot to do as people are just getting used to having you there, so scope out their social media presence and see if any improvements can be made. If they don’t even have a social media presence, get crackin’.
You might not think you’re a tech savvy person, but at your age and place in the world (Missouri School of Journalism Student at large), you know loads more than most people in your workplace, especially in Britain. For some reason, social media didn’t catch on in the UK the way it did in American businesses, but that’s not to say it can’t and won’t help them.
My first week at idfx magazine moved a tad slowly as my editor compiled some pages for me to work on, but she gave me the Twitter log in and I began to have a look around. Our profile had about 30 Tweets on it and our follower numbers were less than 300.
So, in my spare time, I got to work creating a network of designers by scouring through other design publication’s follower lists. By the end of the first week, I had added more than 100 people to follow, and from there our own followers began to pop up.
Now that my time here is wrapping up, we’ve got more than 1,200 followers and almost 400 tweets. It’s honestly made a huge difference for the company because our online presence has grown to an online personality that other designers want to interact with.
I check our @Mentions daily, and we’ve got conversations going all over the place about social media and future stories for the magazine. It has also upped our blog traffic and generated an overflowing list of ideas for blog posts. It’s even encouraged other magazines in the office to get going on Twitter.
So use that social media brain of yours and get going. You’re bound to impress.
–Jamie Hausman
London Calling 