How would I determine an increase/decrease in social media engagement? What time periods do I compare?

Question

I recently finished an internship and need to compare data for my resume. I worked there for exactly 57 days from May 30-July 17. So to figure out overall engagement, would I compare the time period I worked there, May 30-July 17, to the same amount of time before I worked there from April 11- May 29 (also 57 days)?

UPDATE: My friend told me to compare the day July 17 to the day May 30 to find out the increase in engagements. Is this accurate?

Answer 1

It depends on what you want to compare data on, and what you wish to illustrate with the data. What is your intention? You can use the time period you worked there alone to chart activity that happened while you served your internship. You can also compare that to the same time period in the prior year, but the question is, what is it you are comparing? What point are you making with that comparison?

If your point is to show that the company was in a period of steady activity but no growth, and you came along and spurred growth, then take a time period from before you arrived that is long enough to show activity but not necessarily growth, and compare it to your time period, which presumably would show growth.

If your point is just to show an example of WHAT you do, you can just show the time period you were there and break it down to your outreach strategies and their effectiveness.

It's about deciding first WHAT you want to market in your self first - what skills, what accomplishments, what methods... and then depending on WHAT you are marketing, then the data you pull will be whatever best supports and represents the WHAT point that you want to get across to the audience, and what is it that the audience wants to see from you.

So it goes into what job are you applying for, what company, what are they looking for in that position, etc. If you need some coaching in preparing your cv, resume or presentation this is one of the areas I can help you with through a Wyzant session. Message me if you'd like to book an interview, job or presentation prep coaching session :)

Good luck!

Meilani