We've all seen the latest trend of businesses bringing on 20-something interns and letting them handle all of their company's social media policies and strategies.
Meanwhile, there's been a backlash of people saying that interns are unproven and unable to handle that responsibility. They say that interns use social media, but don't know any tactics or strategies beyond creating a Facebook or Twitter account.
This debate has been heating up, with public relations professionals, social media influencers, and corporate executives all taking sides in one of these two camps. In fact, just this morning I saw an article called "Interns make coffee not social media strategy."
And as a social media intern myself, I think it's time I speak on this issue.
I agree with social media intern critics that it's ridiculous to give interns all of the social media responsibility. However, I completely disagree with their reasons. The ones listed in that article were that interns don't know or care about the brand and that they don't know marketing.
Here's the thing: if your intern doesn't know about your brand or marketing, do a better job of teaching them. And if your intern doesn't care about your brand, hire a better intern.
Interns will care about a brand and a company that takes the time to teach them and takes them seriously as aspiring professionals. And considering that most interns these days have a college degree (or at least have completed a few marketing or PR classes), interns are starting the job with more know-how than interns in the past.
And that's why I think interns should play a role in social media, but the majority of the work and responsibility should still fall on the actual marketing or public relations professionals. No, most interns don't know all of the strategy and analytics behind social media, but interns are usually in the target demographic and can offer some insight and ideas.
So in the end, as with many things in life, the reality of the situation lies in between the two extremes that have dominated the headlines.
