The Garcia Diaries is a social media influencer/brand that was started by Bethanie Garcia when she was 17 years old. She is now in her early 30’s and her brand has significantly grown, reaching 340,000 followers. I have been lucky enough to work closely with her and learning and navigating the “influencer life”. I want to share some of the things that I have learned and also share my experience working with an influencer. So at first I was a bit intimidated. I am very unfamiliar with this world and have only seen it from an outside perspective. But Bethanie is very kind and was very easy to work with. She talked me through everything I needed to know and if I was having a hard time understanding then she would dumb it down another level to help me understand. I was learning about photo editing, podcasting, paid promotions, and marketing. The most exciting thing that I got to work on was the podcasting. I have always been intrigued by podcasts and have wanted to get into that world. And The Garcia Diaries has a fairy succesful podcast. I got to see the behind the scenes of the making of a podcast and this was very fulfilling and fun to see. Bethanie is pretty experienced and she has about 5 pages worth of talking points and questions but barely looks at her notes and flows from conversation to conversation very smoothly. This experience gave me a newfound appreciation for the behind the scenes work that goes into creating impactful content. I now understand how much effort and thoughtfulness are required to make a podcast episode appear effortless to the listener. It also solidified my interest in storytelling and digital media as a potential career path. I also learned that most influencers do not even run their own social media account. Bethanie does have her own access to her account but most of her post are from her publicist or assistants that are making their posts for her if they ads or promotions. I found it interesting seeing this person in real life vs. on social media. Because I always felt that most influencers were not authentic and were just faking their personality, but Bethanie was the same person. She is very out there and very funny and she does battle with anxiety as she has talked about on her podcast but I had a blast working with her. While working with her I was tasked to make social media posts that are appealing to her audience which was a hard task at first because her audience is primarily females who have children. But this was a fun and challenging task to get out of my comfort zone and really use my creativity to make post for her. There was some trial and error at first but again, Bethanie was very kind and helped me the whole way. I am unsure if social media is the route I want to go down after I graduate from college but it does seem fun although it is a lot of work. But I am glad that I opened myself up to this world and now have that connection just in case.
