The Simternship

    I successfully finished all 12 rounds in the Stukent Simternship, a semester-long simulation that immerses students in a realistic working environment. This experience allowed me to gain valuable skills in marketing and expand my knowledge of the social media field. Throughout the Simternship, I engaged in various types of social media posts, including organic posts, paid posts and influencer posts. I carefully analyzed the analytics for each post and considered the company's feedback in order to effectively manage the social media accounts for Buhi, a company that specializes in selling bags of all kinds. As students, we had the opportunity to promote these products through a series of posts and collaborate with influencers to increase brand awareness, reach, conversions, likes, followers and more. I used the feedback from each round of posts to improve and refine my strategies for the next rounds. This feedback encompassed the optimal posting times, content quality, revenue generation and audience engagement. It was a fascinating learning experience and I not only gained knowledge about content creation but also discovered how much I enjoyed this type of work.

    Throughout the 12 rounds, each round became progressively more challenging. The organic posts were the simplest, requiring only the selection of media, caption creation and finding the optimal posting time. The paid social posts were slightly more complex, involving the creation of posts, captions, media content, budget allocation and targeting the desired audience. When it came to recruiting social media influencers, it involved a straightforward negotiation with the influencers of my choice to benefit the business, but I had to decide on the type of content I wanted them to promote. Finally, in the last 3 rounds, I had to combine all of these content strategies or posts. The budget increased from $500 to $5,000, but remained at $5,000 for the subsequent rounds. The influencer rounds proved to be the most challenging for me as I felt the need to experiment with various approaches to determine what worked best. I quickly realized that less is more and a single influential individual is more valuable than multiple smaller influencers, as they can reach a larger audience. I also discovered that sending influencers gifts was not beneficial as it depleted my budget and did not result in them creating content for Buhi products. As I reached the final 3 rounds, where all post types were combined, it became crucial to analyze all previous rounds. This allowed me to gain a comprehensive understanding of the posts and influencers, which I had not previously examined. Additionally, I learned that the most successful posts were those that advertised sales and offered free online shipping. These posts generated the highest revenue. While the performance of various platforms varied, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube stood out as the most effective.

    Throughout this process, I gained valuable knowledge on becoming a social media influencer and effectively utilizing algorithms to determine optimal posting times and media. Collaborating with other influencers and receiving feedback on my content taught me valuable skills. Additionally, I learned how to analyze media and conversions to create engaging content for social media users. As a result, I successfully represented Buhi and generated significant revenue during the Simternship. If you are looking for a program to help you analyze your social media skills check out Stukent’s Simternship.