SMM Interview Questions And Answers

SEO skills are important to have when you are working with social media. Talk about your SEO strategies, the tools you use and the way you measure and analyze the results.
Google Analytics is a must here. Also, provide examples and be prepared to be tested by the recruiter.

If you are a social networking enthusiast, you surely follow some blogs and influencers. Let the recruiter know you are always up to date and share your favorites!

Do these match the platforms on which your business is active?

This question moves from the more general and abstract into the meat of the matter. They should be able to outline 2 or 3 specific strategies that will feed leads into your sales funnel via social engagement.

Leave this question open-ended, just as it is phrased above. Your company may already have social media management software in place or you may be looking for a recommendation. If they’re only familiar with free software that does nothing more than allow them to schedule posts to Facebook and Twitter, it’s not a good sign. Ask them why they like or don’t like different tools and which features they use most.

Everybody makes mistakes, it’s not a big deal. Be completely honest about this and focus on what you learned from your bad experiences. Tell your negative stories, too. Also, mention how you corrected it and the changes you made to avoid it from happening again in the future.

Engagement, brand reach, lead generation, and conversions. These are the essential measures of social media’s return on investment (ROI). They should also be able to more specific in terms of Google Analytics, metrics from software they use, or metrics from a specific platform. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that engagement on its own is success either. Without conversions that can be tracked back to that engagement, efforts have been unsuccessful.

Besides social sites, there are a number of other communities like Social Buzz Club, Viral Content Buzz, Triberr, etc. that brings together content creators and enhance their social media promotion.

Here, you can mention how big the accounts you managed were, the number of followers, the strategy you followed, etc. Not enough big brand experience? No problem, you may also talk about your personal social networks but make sure they are “job seeking friendly”.

You need to know how social media is giving you something quantifiable for your money. Social Media ROI = Number of Leads.

Social media marketing strategies that generate leads require social advertising. Each platform has its strengths but, in most cases, Facebook ads offer the biggest opportunities.

Before giving you an answer, the best candidates will come back and ask you about the blog's metrics, how many leads and customers it generates, what the goals are for it, how much you're investing in it, and so on. This is also a great way to test whether they actually prepared for the interview by reading your blog.

Use tools like the Conversion Measurement tool on Facebook and Optimized CPM. Your website will also often have analytics used to measure social media ROI. Lastly, some of the platforms themselves such as LinkedIn have their own analytics. The fundamental measures are the same as in other areas of marketing: clicks, likes, shares, purchases, change in attitude, etc.

Asking a social media manager to define what that ‘crisis’ means to them can highlight their level of experience. If their biggest crisis consists of miss-typing a URL on a Pinterest pin and not noticing until their client asks why there’s so many messages about broken links, then chances are they are vastly inexperienced. It’s also insightful to ask what steps they took to resolve the crisis and how the situation was handled.

Talk about why the strategy inspired you but, more importantly, also detail how you would love to create an original strategy of the same caliber. Explain how you would do this and implement it in the context of the job you’re interviewing for.

Ask them to define what that means to them and what steps they would take to resolve a situation.

If the company doesn’t have a “best practices” protocol in place, it’s time to get one. This would be included in your Social Media Policy and should emulate your current conflict resolution process.

I honestly don’t like this question but I think it is fair to ask a social media manager this directly before hiring in order to see how they can sell themselves. This could have strong implications if your campaigns are tuned towards sales and lead generation. A social media manager should demonstrate how valuable they can be to you and what makes them different or valuable in your situation.

There are definitely more questions that could be asked when hiring a social media manager. Some will no doubt be specific to your business or industry. Hopefully, asking questions like these will help you determine the right social media manager for your business.

You’re looking to see if they have habits in place for checking notifications of brand mentions, content shares, comments and other engagements, across the business’s active social platforms.

Social engagement doesn’t end when you publish your Facebook page. In fact, creating profiles is often the ‘easiest’ part of the process. The execution of the community management strategies that follows is the more difficult (and more expensive) element.

It is important to know how your social media manager approaches community management and what strategies and tactics they will use to interact with your audiences. If you don’t know this, then you will have no clue on how they will manage your brand online. You should have guidance and offer feedback into how your business is positioned and wants to be perceived online.

To increase your reach on Facebook you can consider following tips

☛ Improve your Facebook EdgeRank -> It determines which of your post get most visibility in your fans newsfeed
☛ Stop using third-party tools -> Don’t use any third party tools for scheduling posts and posting to social media
☛ Get your likes up -> Use like-gating in which likes are given in exchange for access to content such as free download
☛ Buy some Ads -> Buying some ads can be a smart move
☛ Keep building your own Email list and Website -> Make direct contact to fans by building your own e-mail list and website.

Social media employers often stress conversation, storytelling, and engagement. Give examples of how you have conversed with clients and consumers, created interesting stories, and increased measures of engagement such as clicks, likes, reach, etc. Any campaign you mention should have these three elements at the very least. Be sure to save dashboards and results from your campaigns so you can show them off later!

Here you will need to drop some names. It’s important you know how to use one or more Social Media Management platforms such as HootSuite, SproutSocial or TweetDeck. Be prepared to explain why you use them and what features you like from one or the other.

Any social media manager who values your work opportunity will do initial research before sitting down with you. If they doesn’t know what your competitors are doing, it should raise alarm bells. A social media manager should be able to give you insight into the way your competitors are using the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube right from the offset. This can always be researched fully later, but will give you an idea into their proactiveness and organisation.

A great community manager should be proficient in most of the social media platforms and social media management tools we’ve mentioned so far. He/she should have unrivaled communications skills and be likeable and organized. Employers also value a background in analytics even if those analytics were not directly related to social media.

The ideal candidate will recognize that a business can have multiple objectives for their social media efforts, and hopefully name one or two that happen to be your business’s goals.

Social media managers should practice what they preach. You can ask to see their blog in action and see if they are posting regularly. Being a social media manager is about so much more than updating Facebook and Twitter. Content should be balanced, otherwise your social streams will either be giant advertisements or lists of interesting articles that they came across.

A good social media manager will be able to write effectively, allowing you to have a constant stream of interesting and engaging articles. They will also be SEO savvy and content will be optimised to have the right keywords in the right place, ultimately linking back to your business. You can ask to see what articles the social media manager has already written so you can determine whether or not their style of writing would fit your business.