Ashley Risser – Marketing Internship

Hi, my name is Ashley Risser. I am interning with Rachel Kline Marketing and Creative in Lancaster, PA. I get the chance to work at Inspire Business Community, an all-woman co-working space, in Rachel’s office space. At my internship, I am starting to take over the social media platforms for Keep’em in Stitches. Keep’em in Stitches is a business made up of a few friends who make knitted animal hats. They started their business out of their homes and has been running it for about 6 years. Rachel’s job was to set-up and manage the social media accounts for businesses including Facebook, Instagram, and Etsy. Right now, I am transitioning into posting and putting up listings on Etsy. I have been posted consistently on Facebook and I am starting to post on Instagram.

The main projects that I am working on are posting on Facebook and getting organized and career ready. On the business side of things, I have started doing new listings on Etsy which has increased business. I have also been doing Facebook posts consistently. Along with learning how to be creative with the captions and all the “requirements” for the captions and postings, I have learned how to schedule posts so that I can spend a chunk of time doing posts instead of having to post every day. So, I have been using Planoly to schedule posts for Instagram. On Facebook, I use Facebook Pages and in-app there is a scheduler. I have been using many tools to help create these posts for the business. I have also learned important things like organizational skills, people skills, and basic job professionalism.

Some challenges that I have experienced have been finding time outside of my internship to work on posting. Because I have a busy schedule outside of school, I barely have any time to work on my internship. Although I have had some challenges, some successes have been getting good feedback from my friends on the Facebook posts that they look “professionally done.” I’ve also gone out of my comfort zone a little by doing an Instagram live video with Rachel’s Thrive Podcast Instagram. I also have physically listened in on a podcast or two, which I enjoyed greatly.

Overall, this internship opportunity has greatly impacted me and my future goals. I have noticed things that I don’t like about running a business and things that fire me up and increase my passion for starting my own business. This experience, so far, hasn’t changed my future plans very much, but have helped me have a better, more narrow focus of how and what I want to do in moving forward with my career.