Media Advertising Officer Interview Preparation Guide

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Passion. A focus on results. Helping companies engage customers to grow their business. Your answers should even describe what parts of marketing interest you. Content development? Demand generation? Strategy? Marketing technologies? Analytics? Geek out and let me know what rocks your socks.

The interviewer is listening for an answer that indicates you’ve given this some thought and are not sending out resumes just because there is an opening. For example, “I’ve selected key companies whose mission statements are in line with my values, where I know I could be excited about what the company does, and this company is very high on my list of desirable choices.”

This is the most dreaded question of all. Handle it by minimizing your weakness and emphasizing your strengths. Stay away from personal qualities and concentrate on professional traits: “I am always working on improving my communication skills to be a more effective presenter. I recently joined Toastmasters, which I find very helpful.”

The advertising world is always changing, and it's easy for an employee to be left behind if he doesn't follow industry news. The constantly evolving world of social media also requires employees to understand and utilize these new methods of getting clients' messages out. Additionally, these kinds of questions allow the applicant to ask his own questions and begin a potentially valuable exchange of ideas.

Summarize your experiences: “With five years’ experience working in the financial industry and my proven record of saving the company money, I could make a big difference in your company. I’m confident I would be a great addition to your team.”

Again, it comes down to judgment. It might be tempting to respond to every negative comment on social media, but a good social media specialist will know how to distinguish between legitimate customer complaints and people who are just looking for attention.

Be very thorough with one of the most commonly asked social media questions. Since Social Media is highly customizable in nature with social media ads, it is important for every business, be it small or large. For instance, Facebook ads allow you to target users by things like industry, education level, location, history of purchases, and the pages they have liked.

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.

Few of the ways for driving traffic to your blog are:

☛ Promotion of content across platforms like Tumblr.com, Pinterest.com, Facebook.com, and more.
☛ Use Instagram to share the title of your blog post or image. Post images to platforms like Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, Facebook, and Tumblr.
☛ Giving short presentation of content on SlideShare and providing link to the content or blog from SlideShare.
☛ Pin your post to Pinterest contributors by using an attractive title of the blog, image, hashtags, and adding keywords.
☛ Create a few seconds preview of your post like Vine or video which could be posted on Twitter and Instagram with a link to the blog post.

Helps you get wider audiences for the content
It enables you in email subscriptions, feeding content to readers, and live bookmarking.

Always use hashtags and mentions! Doing this will mean more people see your tweets and retweet. Some of these people might have big followings or clout that will benefit your company. Twitter is a great tool for conversing with customers so make sure to reply to their tweets as much as you can. Use hashtags to connect the conversation with other conversations in related topics.

Here are some of the best social media tools to leverage:

☛ Sproutsocial
This tool manages multiple pages, brands, and searches. It assigns the task to team members, post analytics, competitor research, and reporting.

☛ HootSuite
It is used for search or monitoring, reporting, social media dashboard, and team management.

☛ Radian 6
Enterprise social media management application for post analytics, research, listening, and campaigns.

☛ Zendesk
For collecting messages from social into one collaborative inbox, customer engagement platform, e-mail voice etc.

☛ TweetDeck
Similar to HootSuite, TweetDeck helps to manage multiple social media platforms like LinkedIn, Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

☛ Crowdbooster
This tool is used to measure user engagement over time across various social media networks. It also gives clue on what kind of content will suit your business the best.

This is one of the most common social media questions you will face during interview.

With this question, the recruiter wants to know more about you as a candidate and why you chose to work as a social media marketer. Tell them your passion and your enthusiasm to work in the industry in the future. Back your answers with a story with regard to what makes you a fitting candidate.

The near best response could be to say that you are aware that the industry is dynamic and challenging which attracts you even more. Show that you don’t prefer a boring job rather you would love to overcome challenges every day.

It’s ok to praise the competitors here if they are genuinely doing something good. Don’t go overboard and make it seem like you’d rather work for these competitors but don’t be afraid to be honest if you think they have a strategy that the company you’re interviewing for could learn from. Always be sure to explain why what they are doing is working (or not working). Mention specific social media campaigns if you can.

Social media is a great tool for customer service since you can converse with customers directly, use analytics to see how they’re responding to content, and find influencers to chat with and bring over to your network. Some of these influencers might even be customers. Most social media employers stress the power conversation so have examples of how you’ve reached out to customers. Social media is also a good indicator of overall company vitality and analytics.

They will hire you only if you know how to generate leads!

Here you need to know how social media is giving you an something quantifiable for the investment you are putting in.

Social Media ROI = No. of Leads

Be ready to talk about social media advertising. Know the strengths of each social media platforms. Remember that Facebook ads offer a pool of opportunities for businesses.

You should know the company’s goals and objectives before starting to track and measure their social ROI. There are various ways in which it could be measured:

☛ Customer Acquisition
☛ Reach
☛ Traffic
☛ Lead Generation
☛ Revenue
☛ clicks
☛ Contest Entries
These are some factors you can use to measure social ROI. After establishing what is the marketing goal of the company, you shall then assign financial values to each goal.

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.

Your social media specialist will be responsible for devising and executing campaigns, so you want to get some insight into how they approach their work. Great candidates should be able to articulate the problem they were trying to address, how they set goals, what tactics they used, and how they measured their results. It’s not necessary that the campaign was a smashing success, as long as the professional approached it in a deliberate way while gaining insights that helped them develop better campaigns in the future.

SEO is a desireable skill for social media marketers and marketers in general since companies always want their content to rank as high as possible on a Google search. Explain how social media helps make this happen by boosting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs…you should know what these are!), making content more share-worthy and perhaps even viral, stressing keywords, and by simply increasing the amount of content attached to a brand. Talk about how you always factor SEO into any social media strategy and detail exactly how you did it in the past.

Some of the best ways to use Twitter are:

☛ Using not more than 2 hashtags every tweet.
☛ Keeping the tweets around 100 characters. Make your tweets crisp and hitting.
☛ Schedule and plan your tweets with the help of Buffer or TweetDeck.
☛ With the help of Twitter Advanced search, you can manage your Twitter Marketing activities.
☛ Keeping a check on Twitter Analytics to know what could be done to improvise the strategy.

This kind of open-ended question invites a prospective employee to simply describe the marketing efforts he thinks work. As the interviewee describes campaigns that have made an impression on him, you will learn about his overall outlook on marketing. Further, you'll learn what kind of campaigns he might like to create. This information can help you decide if the applicant will be a good fit for your agency.

Everyone show (probably brag) their accomplishments in their CV and the chances are high that you have done it too. Then why is the interviewer posing such a question?

Well, they wish to know about your accomplishments in your words. They want to know how you started a particular social media campaign, how you tracked the success, and what profit it made for the company. While you are talking about your previous campaigns, they will judge you on your enthusiasm for the industry and how passionate you are.

Pro Tip: Talk in numbers and don’t give them false hope.

It is one of the most common social media job interview questions faced by a social media manager.

Tell them what ‘Online Reputation Crisis’ means to you (in accordance to their company’s working) and what are the possible steps you would take to resolve the problem.

Suggest them to have ‘best practice’ protocol if they don’t have one. Mention about the social media policy and how will you resolve the conflicting situation.

Good social media managers won’t just blast content onto their channels. They will have a deliberate strategy behind their campaigns and use professional tools to monitor their effectiveness. Dashboards like Hootsuite and Sprout Social give social media specialists the ability to both manage channels and perform basic analytics from one interface.