My Magazine Marketing as a Media Specialist
Hi! My name is Muyang Morfaw and I am an Advertising major with a double concentration in Account Management and Media Planning. For the semester, I was a Social Media Strategist for the company EPK Media and their client Civilian Magazine. Both companies are located in New York City.
This experience has taught me how diligent you must be when working on social media. Everything is on a specific schedule for a reason, and you must follow it. This internship has also taught me the importance of doing things ahead of time. There is way more that goes into social media than just posting. You must check the insights for your account(s), make sure the accounts look clean, and easy to understand for people that follow and visit your pages. Making sure that your post, the caption, and the possible hashtags that you use all correlate was a tip that learned during this internship. Creating deadlines for yourself and small personal goals goes a long way when you want to complete your task properly but in a timely manner. Since this was a remote position, all communication was done through emails. As time went on, I became more comfortable and proficient in communicating respectfully and clearly through emails. I enjoy the field that I am in now. The tasks that I am required to do for this job were simple and straightforward. But I am not sure if this is the same for all social media jobs. I would like to pursue more graphic design and gain physical experience with content creation. When it comes to creating content for social media, I want to work more in-depth with the creative departments. I don’t want to do just graphic design, I also want to do some video producing and editing as well.
The positive side of this internship was how convenient the job was and how easily it fit into my school schedule. I very much liked the fact that it was remote so that I could have a nice work-life balance. Everyone is so appreciative of all my hard work that they really treat me as a social media expert. I spoke to the Director of Technology for EPK Media. I learned so much about the industry and how to be a successful Social Media Manager. He gave me tips on how to post, track hashtag analytics, and the importance of making your post correlate with your overall theme. The whole conversation was mainly about us getting to know each other and him guiding me on how I should handle a social media idea that I had.
I honestly didn’t have that many expectations for this internship. At first, I thought the internship would involve more interactions with other employees like Zoom meetings and whatnot. I also thought I would get a chance to present the social media strategies that I made to the clients so that they can see me and personally ask me questions instead of going through a third party. My tasks were on a project-by-project basis. Overall, I was so excited that I got the opportunity that my only expectation was to gain valuable knowledge about working with media and seeing my current strengths and weaknesses.
The advice I would give to others is to don’t be shy to speak up and share your ideas and opinions. It won’t hurt to tell other employees and managers your idea for the company. It shows that you take initiative and are innovative. Another piece of advice is to never be afraid of asking for help. I used to think that doing everything myself is good and reflects well on my work ethic but that is not 100% true. A big part of working in this industry is doing collaborative work. Yes, you will get tasks that you have to do yourself but asking one or two coworkers for help will make your job easier.
