Buhi Simternship

Over the course of this semester, I have worked on and completed a simulation internship for my social media class. The ‘simternship’, as Stukent calls it, was comprised of 12 rounds that were broken up into four sections. With each section containing three rounds, the sections consisted of the following: organic social posts, paid social posts, social media influencers, and the combination of all three at once.

During the first three rounds of the simternship, I did not do as well as I would have liked with organic posts. I tried to keep the number of posts and money spent on media for posts fairly equal between platforms. This tactic did not play out too well for me because some platforms did not generate as much revenue as I had spent on media for them. However, I gave myself some grace because it was still early-on, and I wanted to allow myself to learn which platforms perform the best and which ones I should optimize more throughout the rest of the simulation. So, when it came to paid social posts, I focused on dividing up my budget differently among each platform based on how well they had generated revenue in the first three rounds. I found that Instagram always performed the best, so the majority of my budget would go there, and so on for each platform. I found that spending more on the networks with higher profit returns and less on the ones with low profit returns worked out very well for me. Additionally, I did not have much struggle when it came to negotiating with the influencers. I discovered that it worked for me to split the budget and have one macro-influencer with either one mega-influencer or two micro-influencers for each round. However, I did struggle a bit for the last three rounds of the simulation though. Each round had an allocated budget of $5,000, which had been easy for me to divide up between the rounds until I had to account for all three at once. I found it helpful to use free or purchased media for organic posts and only have to spend money on paid social media and influencers. But still, I found negotiating on a smaller budget a lot harder of a task.

Overall, I really enjoyed participating in this simternship this semester! As someone who handles social media for work, I thought the interaction and engagement this assignment provided was incredibly useful. It was a great learning experience, and I am proud of myself for coming in first place, generating a total revenue of $547,735.70.