If you’ve been following this blog or have attended any of my social media classes, you’ve received a lot of information on how to use social media responsibly and well, without it taking over your life. However, there’s no ignoring the reality that it does take time.

Which leads many to either outsource their social media or hire an intern.

Hiring a social media intern can be an excellent option, but hiring that intern must be done with care. It’s not enough to find some “20 something” and say “Go for it!” Your social media is your reputation online, and you want to be certain it’s being managed well.

This is the first post in a multi-part series on hiring and managing a social media intern. Let’s start with why.

What are interns good at? They:

• Free you up for what you are really good at
• Provide fresh ideas for your company
• Understand how and why conversations work in social media
• Can bring their fresh ideas to help create a content calendar for your social media. Since they helped create it, they will be motivated to implement the schedule
• Are fast learners and probably more comfortable with social media than you

What about what they aren’t so good at? What do you need to keep in mind when setting boundaries for interns?

• Interns don’t have the deep knowledge of your business that you do, so they need training and mentoring in your social media vision.
• You need to set limits on what kinds of communication they are allowed to handle and when they need to bump something up the chain of command.
• You will have to develop the metrics to track effectiveness and then train them in what to track and how to plug those results into your metric tracking system

And this one is the most important!

Interns should not build your social media presence.

Let me repeat that. Interns should not build your social media presence.

Why? Because having someone else build your pages and profiles can lead to all sorts of problems in the future. What about when the intern leaves? Or is fired? If they have all the user names and passwords, you’re in trouble.

So you do the building. Then teach them what you expect for monitoring.

With me so far? In the next post, I’ll talk about where to find an intern and what you should look for in hiring a good one.

Anyone have an intern story to share (good or not-so-good)?