My experience working with the Marketing team at York as a Social Media Intern has been an exciting insight into the world of marketing and social media content creation. I was given real responsibilities from day one and had an enlightening, and encouraging experience.
I was interested in working in the Marketing sector before I started at university and knew that if I was to be successful in making it into the industry I would need relevant experience, especially given my slightly unrelated degree of Environment, Economics and Ecology.
When I saw the internship on the Careers Gateway, I knew I had to apply for the chance to develop my marketing skills while living and working in York over summer.
Graduation
Graduation was by far the biggest event of the summer. Providing social media coverage over four days, twelve ceremonies, with 3,700 students graduating was a tiring but rewarding task.
I wanted to try something different with the Instagram feed over graduation so I designed a large graphic template, that could be split into nine separate Instagram posts. At the end of each day, I added in photos into the Polaroid frames and posted the separate photos. Once completed the feed made up one large graduation graphic.
It took a lot of planning but I was proud of the final content. This was something that the team hadn’t tried before on the University Instagram so it was good to be given the freedom to experiment.
The best performing piece of social content from graduation was coverage of the presentation of actor Mark Addy’s honorary degree. As a big Game of Thrones fan, I took the opportunity to incorporate some relevant references in the content. This post ended up being our best-performing Graduation tweet.
Over the summer the university’s Instagram account reached 20,000 followers. I enjoyed the chance to create a graphic to celebrate this milestone.
Throughout my placement I’ve enjoyed having the opportunity to use and build on my design skills. I’ve learned how to work to design standards, and produce written and visual content which fits into a defined corporate brand identity. With social media it’s possible to be more creative with the style we use and this suits the dynamic nature of the platforms and channels we share content on.
I want to thank everyone here at the Marketing team who has helped me out. It has truly been a great learning experience!