Good morning. With ChatGPT writing half of America’s undergraduate papers, everyone is terrified that AI is going to remove human authenticity from business. Will AI create every new ad we see? Will TikTok be filled with AI generated content? Well, don’t be alarmed, companies like beautiful.ai are still harnessing the power of interns to craft social content. 

Find out how Brenda Lai earned an internship with beautiful.ai, what she did in that role, and what you can do to earn one too.

—Sean Sebers

In today's edition:

🏆 What earned her the role?

📊 What she does

📈 Give us more!

Brenda Lai

Content Marketing and Social Media Intern

Brenda is a Cupertino-born, Bay Area native pursuing a degree in public relations and advertising at Chapman University. Her degree is uniquely taught through Chapman’s film school, so Brenda is exposed to working on film sets, production teams, and student-film social media accounts. Brenda is also an advanced foodie who loves to explore other cultures through cuisine and photography.

The company she interned for, beautiful.ai, is a software company specializing in generative AI presentations. Essentially, businesses that need a high volume of slides can now leverage beautiful.ai’s presentation-making software to bust out beautiful decks in seconds.

What earned her the role @beautiful.ai?

Prior to being hired, Brenda developed a content portfolio that included pretty much every project she completed for work and school.

Included in this portfolio was…

1. A TikTok account for her Chapman film school that she grew over six months as the lead content creator

2. Instagram posts she made as a marketing assistant for her school’s career office

3. Mock campaigns and social media posts from class assignments

4. Photography, graphic design, and writing examples

The accumulation of this work started at the end her freshman year when she became an office assistant for Chapman’s campus design department. From there she secured roles in social media marketing, public relations, marketing tech, content marketing, and…beautiful.ai. 

After sending around 50 cold applications on LinkedIn, Brenda was reached out to by beautiful.ai for an interview. The company’s main goal was to find someone who could create short form video content for their socials, and oh boy, Brenda did not disappoint. Having worked with social media for internships and campus accounts, her interviewers knew she had the chops. Additionally, Brenda did extensive research on beautiful.ai prior to her interview, being able to recall important facts about their funding rounds. All of this combined for a smooth interview and a new internship for Brenda.

PRO TIP: Having a portfolio is incredibly valuable in the marketing world. Whether it’s social media, graphic design, writing samples, or some other form of media work, starting a project on something you enjoy will give you a leg up in industry. Include relevant schoolwork, passion projects, and personal accounts!

What a content marketing and social media intern @beautiful.ai does:

Brenda’s work for beautiful.ai can be described in three main parts: 1) Creating social media content, 2) Community management, and 3) Influencer marketing.

Social Media Content

Every month, Brenda and her manager would create a content calendar to keep track of the type of posts they wanted to publish. Brenda’s main role was to create short form video content from preexisting webinars, but she also implemented carousel posts and polls to grow an audience. While interning, Brenda had to ask herself questions like: What types of videos should be posted on which platforms? What graphics should be used? And when should different events be promoted?

From these questions, Brenda determined that TikTok, Insta Reels, and LinkedIn were the best platforms to post video content. Since the demographics of each platform are different, she would change one piece of content three times to be unique for each audience. For example, LinkedIn has more executive level users than a platform like TikTok, so silly content might not be as well received on LinkedIn. 

Carousels and polls were also a solid tool for Brenda. She researched different AI startups and featured them in carousel posts for LinkedIn, Instagram, and as different threads on Twitter. With polls she was able to interact with beautiful.ai’s audience and get their thoughts on all things AI. Designing images for posts herself and collaborating with an in-house designer was also part of her content creation process.

Community Management

With great social media posts comes a great deal of community management. Brenda was in charge of checking the comments and engagements for posts on all social media accounts. If a post had more than 10k messages, she’d flag it and post it in the company Slack as a celebratory announcement. If someone interacted with a beautiful.ai post by sharing it, Brenda would thank them via the company profile.

Influencer Marketing

During her time, Beautiful.ai wanted to work more with AI/tech influencers in the TikTok space, and Brenda had the opportunity to spearhead this effort. She would start by researching influencers/creators who had good footholds in tech niches. She’d then reach out via email to see what kinds of media kits they had and what a collaboration might look like.

• Media kits are documents that influencers/creators have to quickly tell a client what kind of an audience they have and what kinds of content they can create for advertisements.

Brenda also created a document to send to influencers that included beautiful.ai’s project goals, their desired content, and what kind of a company they are. Beyond the document, Brenda acted as the middleman of info between her manager and the influencers.

Feel free to reach out to Brenda through LinkedIn if you’re interested in learning more about her experiences!

📈Give Us More!

💼Want to hear more from Brenda?

• Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel linked here.

🔍Connect with Brenda!

• Connect with her on LinkedIn here.

📢Advice from Brenda:

In general, I think that people can sometimes be afraid to even apply to a job. You have to keep in mind that you're a college student, and you're applying for an internship. Part of that internship is where you're going to learn—like they literally want you to learn. You don't have to know everything when you're applying to these positions. Just because you haven't done “X, Y, or Z” doesn't mean you can't shoot your shot and try for it.

Also, in your interviews, you have to have done research while showing a lot of passion. People should be purposeful when they apply to internships. I wouldn’t recommend applying to jobs just to do something. Although it's good to try different things for the sake of experience, it’s important to be purposeful with the career bridge you build as a college student. If anything, it's good to try different responsibilities within marketing and not to be afraid to click apply for a job that interests you. You never quite know what's going to happen, and there are always people who can find potential in you.

—Brenda Lai

*Edited for clarity*