Not Just for Interns

In defense of social media content creation as a digital writing profession (and interns)

Social Media as a Digital Writing Platform

“The current social media landscape has two key aspects to it. First are the platforms—major and minor, established and emerging—that provide the underlying technologies and business models making up the industry and ecosystem. Second, are the use cases; i.e., how various kinds of people and organizations are using these technologies and for what purposes,” says the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Sciences (Appel, et al., 2019).

“Presently, people around the world use social media in its various forms (e.g., news feeds on Facebook and Twitter, private messaging on WhatsApp and WeChat, and discussion forums on Reddit) for a number of purposes. These can generally be categorized as (1) digitally communicating and socializing with known others, such as family and friends, (2) doing the same but with unknown others but who share common interests, and (3) accessing and contributing to digital content such as news, gossip, and user-generated product reviews,” (Appel, et al., 2019).

Social media strategy takes many factors that require a good bit of professional judgment. According to Kim and Vorobel: “Digital discourse has semiotic characteristics including coherence and cohesion, or texture and flow (Gee 2015); intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Vásquez 2015); a dialogic character, the interaction between readers and writers and between human users and machines (Jones 2015); multimodality; and reflexivity, the ability to analyze input and customize based on human actions (Jones 2015),” (2016).  In most other jobs, we see these traits as mid to senior-level qualities and yet treat social media as nothing more than something to throw onto entry-level workers.  In reality, social media managers require large amounts of knowledge of digital algorithms, public opinion, and content strategy. ,

Social Media as a Digital Strategy

Strategies from a Social Media Manager

What is a Social Media Manager?

According to Universal Parks and Resorts: "Responsible for managing the strategy and creation of content that builds our social media communities as well as builds brand affinity." According to The Walt Disney Company: "Establish and drive the overarching business-to-business communications strategy for Disney’s consumer products, games and publishing businesses." Social media managers are professional digital creators and rhetoricians that make up the backbone of marketing and communications in the modern (digital) age. Despite being the butt of the office jokes, these managers have a lot to offer a company. Often, social media managers need to have a solid base in marketing, community engagement, statistics, basic HTML, and writing just to land an interview with a prospective employer.

On April 13th, 2022, SouthWest Airlines' Twitter posted about the "social media intern" getting access to the account and "messing around." After a nasty PR scandal with over a thousand flight cancellations and delays just the week before, many were very unhappy with the Tweet. Others, who felt the Tweet was insensitive to those who work in digital media professionally, also spoke out:

"The 'social media is run by interns' joke is so lame & old. Can we please move on from this narrative as an industry? It’s keeping talented individuals from getting paid what [they're] worth & belittling their skillset as if it’s not a daily uphill battle already."

@chithukral on Twitter

"This discourse is exhausting. It’s 2022, social media is a MASSIVE, necessary part of most brands’ marketing strategy, and this constant narrative that it’s all ‘run by interns’ is a constant contributing factor to the poor treatment of SMMs everywhere."

@francescasoph on Twitter

I have a master’s, 9 years of experience, and run teams on multiple continents for major brands. I’m not an intern. My teams are not interns. Interns are great too but good god was this joke overdone already a decade ago. Social media professionals are just that. Professionals.

@kfunsocial on Twitter

When Placed in the Wrong Hands, Social Media can be Dangerous

"My analysis shows that Facebook’s user interface is structured around several design choices that create an ethic that prioritizes concision, speed, curation practices that limit divergent perspectives, and the flattening of complex identities and political commitments such that they are indexable, processable, and thus, monetizable."

Jennifer Sano-Franchini’s “Designing Outrage, Programming Discord: A Critical Interface Analysis of Facebook as a Campaign Technology,”

Sano-Franchini focused her studies on the 2016 election and the effects that social media sites, namely Facebook, had on the outlook on the election and possibly its results. Understanding the agendas platforms themselves may have is vital to the successful running of a brand social media, and that level of social media literacy deserves recognition.

Real Quick: Interns are Awesome!

Working 20-40 hours a week (many times unpaid) for a company that you may not even be offered a position in (while oftentimes a student) is a big deal. Many times, interns are budding professionals with skillsets to back them, just age to hold them back. Let's be kinder to them.

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