4 Social Media Projects for Your Student Intern

Summer is here and so is student intern season. Many travel businesses choose to use these bright young minds to help get ahead on projects and social media is often on the list.

While I've cautioned you in the past about handing over your entire social media strategy to the intern du jour, I’m not opposed to including interns in your toolbox. With a bit of planning and consideration for your intern’s skill set, you can use this extra help to get ahead in your social media efforts.

Here are four types of social media marketing work that a summer intern can easily handle, with your direction.

1. Building your content calendar
Interns are typically great at researching and gathering information. And because they are new to your business, they may also be able to offer you a fresh perspective on the topics that may interest your audience.

If your intern has good marketing skills too, ask them to suggest new topics and ideas for your blog and social postings. The right person can likely fill your content idea pool for several months so you won’t have to stress over it.

2. Getting a leg up on content research
Whether you need to research information for upcoming blog posts, build a list of sharable tips, or gather links to interesting things to share, you don’t need to do it yourself. Put your intern to work by giving them specific instructions, or a theme, and send them on the hunt.

After the intern comes back with information you can use, send them on different missions.

If you stockpile the information they find for you, you’ll build a reserve of good social content and ideas in a very short amount of time. All you have left to do is to pick and choose what will get posted.

3. Creating a library of shareable images and graphics
Social media is becoming increasingly visual, and you can make great visuals out of all kinds of elements – including quotes, tips, questions and travel images.

If your intern has design skills or knows their way around apps like PicMonkey or Canva, they can easily create a great collection of images for you.

4. Finding new groups, pages or people with whom to interact
If one of your social goals is to expand your network, your intern can help you get there.

Hand him or her a profile of the types of businesses, people or groups with whom you’d like to mingle and ask them to find several options for you.

Your intern can build a list, monitor conversations to see if they’re a good fit and let you know where you should be showing up.

Addendum
If you’re not quite ready to delegate to an intern because you’re still trying to get a grip on your own social media efforts, here's a simple routine that will get you started.

Sophie Bujold is an expert social media strategist and speaker. Sophie’s passion is helping travel professionals make sense of social media and learning how to use these technologies to achieve greater business success. For more insights from Sophie, sign up for her weekly email tips. (It’s free.)