Should you hire an intern to do your social media marketing?

If you know me, you know the answer to this question: It all depends.

I’ve had many prospective clients come to me to inquire about hiring my firm to launch and manage their social media campaigns for them, but once they find out it’s not free or cheap, I never hear from them again. Eventually, though, I hear through other channels that they decided to go in a different direction: they recruit an unpaid intern or volunteer to do the job for them.

Does it bother me? Not a bit. My firm doesn’t lack for referrals or prospects, so I don’t regret turning down jobs, and certainly not the low-value ones. More importantly, I don’t regret not taking on a client who clearly doesn’t understand how social media works. If they did, they wouldn’t have ever dreamed of fobbing off the job to an intern or volunteer with little or no experience.

Now, don’t get me wrong: interns are amazing resources with tremendous energy and lots of great ideas. Many possess a genuine knack for connecting brands with their communities, or launching entire communities from scratch to support a growing brand.

Those wunderkinds, however, are extremely rare, and quite frankly, if they’re that good, they probably won’t be free or cheap either. Not only that, but they probably won’t last at your company for very long. If they’re truly gifted and skilled at social media, they’ll be snapped up by a bigger, better company in no time, one that recognizes their value and is willing to pay them what they’re worth.

So when is it appropriate to hire an intern to develop and manage your social media campaign?

1. If you don’t care about long-term strategy or the continuity of your social media marketing campaign, hire an intern. Unless you’re Starbucks or Coca-Cola, social media will not provide you with an immediate ROI. The fleeting nature of internships mean that by the time your intern is able to establish a solid presence and community around your company’s brand, they’ll be ready to head back to school or a full-time job.
2. If you don’t care about actually developing a strategy for your social media campaign, hire an intern. Again, many interns do a bang-up job with social media and know how to knit all the channels together to drive traffic to your site and build awareness about your company. But too many companies mistake being able to create a Twitter account as the equivalent of social media savvy, and that’s not true. At all. It’s one thing to open a Twitter account, but quite another to actually know how to use it as a marketing tool for a company. Would you hire an intern to direct your traditional direct mail campaign? If not, why would you ask them to take on the gigantic burden of managing your entire social media campaign?
3. If you don’t care about experience and results, hire an intern. The best social media strategists have spent years — that’s right, years – honing their skills in managing online communities, nurturing audiences and creating buzz. Twitter and Facebook may only be a couple of years old, but other social media platforms such as blogging, podcasting and social bookmarking have been around for much longer. While each of them requires a different approach, many of the same themes underlie success in each platform. Some interns have this experience already, but many don’t, and those who do are probably not looking to work for free.

Remember that social media marketing isn’t about putting a warm body up to a computer and an open Twitter account. Don’t treat it as a toy to be played with as you focus on “more important things.” It’s not a fad nor something to be taken lightly. If you’re going to do it, invest the time to do it properly. Your company and its reputation deserves at least that much.

Photo credit: “The intern,” by e-lame. Available on Flickr.com.

Tagged as: social media