Millennials on Instagram

I did not fully know what to expect when I started my internship working for a public relations firm this summer, but I certainly did not think I would be spending as much time in Instagram and I do on a day-to-day basis.

I work on four accounts (Oats Overnight, Healthy Times, Oxigen Water, and The VOID).  As the only intern assigned to each of these clients, I get all of the work that the account managers do not want to do themselves, and the most time consuming task I have been given has been looking up Instagram influencers who could possibly post about each of these companies.

Yes, I was disappointed when I found out that this is part of how I would be spending my summer internship (did I suffer through accounting, calculus, and critical thinking for nothing?), but it has turned out to be one of my biggest contributions to Demonstrate PR. I have made an Excel sheet of close to 800 influencers in different categories such as fitness, famous workout instructors, professional athletes, health/wellness, motherhood, college, and lifestyle, with information such as their name, location, category, number of followers, and contact information. This way, when other employees of Demonstrate PR need to create a list of influencers to reach out to for a future client, they already have a database where they can begin to search for some by category that has all of their updated information.

I have spoken with some of the interns in the San Francisco office who are working on other projects, and we are planning on compiling all of the information we have gathered about Instagram into one sheet so that we can leave the account managers with a great tool that they can utilize in the future.

While I originally thought that this was a tedious and inconsequential task, I remembered that we learned in my marketing class last semester that most people consult social media before making a purchase decision, and younger generations such as Millennials are more likely to trust the opinions of their friends and influencers over actual advertising since they place more trust in their acquaintances and the influencers that they choose to follow on social media. Being able to help the clients that I work with to choose the most influential and cost-effective people to give free samples to so that they will blog/vlog/anything else about their product is definitely one of my biggest personal contributions to Demonstrate PR this summer. So, I suppose that all of that time I “wasted” on social media since middle school actually became useful in some ways!