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The Ups and Downs of a Social Media Internship

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So many of us take up a virtual internship for some reason. Maybe you have entrance exams, or you are occupied with some other work or obligation. And more often than not, the internship job description entails work in the social media department. We’d love to believe that social media is the future, and with the jobs in social media becoming serious every passing day, it is only obvious that many of us are considering a career in this field.

Here’s a quick look at the pros and cons of a social media internship.

Pros:

  1. Quantifiable performance enables you to learn faster while working. We can always assess performances through metrics and analytics such as reach, views, likes, retweets, favourite etc. It becomes easier to learn on your own when you have insight into what works and what doesn’t
  2. You become a pro at knee-jerk reactions. The business environment is more dynamic than ever. Same goes for social media. And a social media internship prepares you well to jump at every opportunity, what with unleashing hashtags when you see something trending on Twitter.
  3. Data analysis becomes a constant job. And sans the agonizing theory of statistics, you get to learn the real world application of mean, mode, median. In an attempt to constantly gauge what works and what doesn’t, you understand the tricks of data analysis faster than any textbook can ever teach you.
  4. You get to be the cool one- from creating memes, trolling the celebrity you dislike, or even the healthy banter that companies nowadays engage in- you get to bring the cool quotient into the otherwise dull and drab corporate affairs.

Cons

  1. No kidding here, but the “glued-to-devices-24*7” isn’t really glamorous. It is all back aches and tired eyes at the end of the day, and you may as well just crash into your bed, with a feeling of hopelessness at yet another unproductive day, when you cannot see the results.
  2. You need to be personally invested and detached simultaneously. Haters gonna hate, and social media makes it so easy for them to lash out on you, whether as a brand or as a person.
  3. The constant urge to stay updated leads to Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), and life becomes monotonous with scheduling and keeping a tab on insights. Consider this: – Tweeting from the wrong account is a legitimate fear, and one typo can be the end of it all.
  4. You are painfully aware that social media is a superficial platform and can never really be fully representative of the real world.

 

Weigh the pros and cons for yourself, and decide if you’re up for a social media adventure!

 

Featured Image Graphic by Kritika Narula

Kritika Narula

[email protected]

With a ginormous appetite for books, she is the kind of person who experiences Book Hangovers way too often. An unabashed fangirl, unbeatable optimist, movie-buff, art-lover, are some of the phrases that define her. In some alternate universe, she feeds on Mac and cheese every living moment. She actually fell in love at first sight: with big words. She can be found sipping coffee in the lawns of IP College, contemplating some quote she read somewhere, when not attending her commerce lectures. Drop her a mail at [email protected]. She’d prefer a tweet @kritika_n_books, though.

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