SIM Recap

This week we submitted the Social Media Simternship that we've been working away at throughout the semester. I think this was a really great tool to utilize in this class. I learned a lot through the different rounds, all of which I think closely aligned with the material that we were also learning in class. I got to mess around with not only content creation, but also learn how companies utilize different types of influencers. 

Throughout the twelve rounds of the SIM, it was done in three different stages. The first one that we started with was scheduled organic posts. Following that was paid posts and then finally paid influencers. In the last three rounds, all of those components were implemented, meaning we had to make organic posts, paid posts and schedule influencers. I definitely found these last three rounds to be pretty difficult because we still only had a $5,000 budget, which was the same amount of money as when we only had to do one of the three strategies. It was hard to spread out $5,000 amongst all three strategies. I struggled a bit in the beginning, but started to get the hang of it once I started the paid social posts rounds. Then, once we reached the rounds using influencers I actually did a lot better and my revenue increased quite a bit. I also had the most fun with the influencer part of it. I did not thrive during the first few rounds creating organic posts. There wasn't as many options to mess around with besides the caption and timing of the post, and while Buhi's social media audit was helpful, I don't feel like I ever really got the hang of that strategy. With the paid social posts, you were able to decide what goal you want to pursue, to decide what call to action to use, decide how much to spend on each post, and more. I had a hard time going back and reviewing the insights after each post because looking at it was so overwhelming, I didn't even know where to start. I paid attention to which platforms were generating the greatest revenue, but that's really the only part that I looked at that made sense. I feel as if I had understood what I was looking at more then I would've been able to make better adjustments. However, that's on me because I would just get too frustrated trying to understand all the numbers and eventually just give up. Working with the influencers was my favorite part. I only had a negotiation not work out once, so I was very successful in getting the influencers in the first place. I liked being able to pick an influencer based on my target audience and then go from there, making sure that they had what I needed to be successful. I ended up making a lot better revenue during the influencer rounds than I did during any of the other ones.

Ultimately, while the SIM was a big time commitment and certainly didn't come without frustrations, I feel like ultimately it was a really good tool to utilize for learning. I enjoyed being able to get a sense of what the real life of a social media manager might look like. There was definitely a lot of creativity involved that I struggled with at first, but after a few rounds it was pretty simple to get the hang of it.