Article
Your Students Think They Know Social Media, but the Data Says Otherwise
Social Media Marketing Resources
If you ask a room full of marketing students if they're confident using social media, you’ll see almost every hand go up. Students spend hours every day creating and posting content, following trends, and engaging on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
However, using social media and managing it for a brand are two very different things. Professional social media marketers do far more than post content. They build strategies, identify target audiences, and analyze data. Practice with those skills will never come from personal use alone. The challenge is that many students don’t realize there is a gap until they enter their first professional role.
That raises an important question for marketing educators: How do you teach professional social media skills to students who are convinced they’ve already mastered them?
The study
In spring 2025, Dr. Kristine Nicolini, Ph.D., APR, at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh studied the effectiveness of the Stukent® Social Media Simternship® in her classroom. For the first time, her students stepped into more than just a creative role. They became social media specialists for Buhi Supply Co., managing organic and paid content, working within budget constraints, and using live performance data to evaluate their decisions week after week.
Pre- and post-course surveys tracked how Dr. Nicolini’s students felt about their skills before and after the experience. The results were hard to ignore.
The results
Before the Simternship, 53% of students reported feeling academically confident in social media marketing. After the Simternship, that number climbed to 85.5%. And career readiness more than doubled, rising from 34.6% to 77.1%.
The data shows that not only did students feel more confident, they felt more confident about the right things. Before, student confidence clustered around familiarity with the platform. After participating in the Simternship, student confidence shifted toward the necessary skills the field needs: analytics-driven decision-making, paid media strategy, and ROI evaluation. One student put it this way:
"There is a lot more prepping that goes into a social media marketing plan than I thought. You can't just find pretty pictures to post and make a caption. You have to research, look at analytics, and have a plan going into it."
That shift in students' perspective showed up across the class. Another student said this:
"My understanding of social media marketing has become much more practical and strategic. I no longer see it as just posting content to gain likes or followers—instead, I now understand it as a data-driven process that requires careful planning, audience targeting, and performance analysis."
Both students realized social media marketing is more strategy than content creation alone.
Simternships make learning accessible to everyone
Not every student walks into your course from the same starting line.
Some students have had internships, while others have run paid campaigns or managed accounts for small businesses. But the majority of students haven't had either. In 2024, Inside Higher Ed reported that there were “8.2 million college students who wanted an internship in the U.S., yet only 3.6 million had access to one, and only 2.5 million had a quality one.” In this job market, experience is expected even at the entry level. Without any experience, that gap will inevitably follow students past graduation, making it much more difficult to land a job or succeed in the one they get.
Simternships help make hands-on experiences more equitable by giving everyone an opportunity to gain career-ready skills.
Students who entered Dr. Nicolini's course with no professional experience gained the most, nearly closing the gap with peers who had already worked in professional settings.
Is the Social Media Simternship a good fit for your course?
The Stukent Social Media Simternship integrates into an existing curriculum without adding prep for instructors. And the outcome speaks for itself. As Dr. Nicolini said:
"Students graduate not just with knowledge, but with confidence, competence, and the ability to articulate their professional readiness to employers."
Stukent offers free instructor access to the Social Media Simternship and courseware so you can explore them before committing to anything.
See the full UWO case study results
This blog post only highlights the final results of this study. The full case study covers the methodology, results by student experience level, and what the data means for how we think about career readiness in marketing education.
Download the Full Case Study →
If you're curious whether the Simternship could work in your classroom, request free instructor access to the platform or schedule a demo to see the Stukent Social Media Simternship in action today!
