Social Media Marketing Simternship

 

I have a love-hate relationship with the Simternship from Stukent. As someone who has taken a few classes with Stukent before, I was not new to the sim part of the program. However, I have never had a sim as hard as the Social Media Marketing one. For this sim, we had to advertise for Buhi Bags. But we had to do much more than create a few generic media posts. For this sim, we had to manage several social media platforms, hire influencers and budget for Buhi.

At first, I was super confident because I had done multiple similar sims before, but creating organic content was one of the hardest things I have ever done in the sims. As someone who often writes captions for social media posts, I thought writing them for a fictional brand would be easy, but I was sadly mistaken. Writing captions for Buhi was the thing I had to practice the most during the sim. Scheduling the posts was also something I had to work on, especially paying attention to whether I was posting something at 1AM or 1PM.

Just as I began getting comfortable with the organic posts, the sim had us practice paid media posts. Surprisingly, I did not mind the paid posts at all. Budgeting is something I enjoy, and I was glad to not have to schedule the posts anymore. After a few rounds of paid posts, I felt more confident with the sim.

Next, we had to schedule influencers to promote Buhi. This part of the sim did not take long, but many of the more popular influencers were much more expensive and did not fit into the budget we were given. I found that because Buhi was a smaller brand, focusing on smaller influencers with higher engagement scores aligned better with the brand and that reflected in my sales and views.

As I worked through the sim, I learned that much more goes into managing social media than I realized. I learned about how to write engaging captions, post at optimal times and how to budget for promoted content and graphics. I am glad I did this sim and got to practice social media skills without worrying about posting something for actual people to see. I think it helped me feel more open to experimenting with posts and captions.