Social Media Interview Preparation Guide

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A “Yes!” here would definitely not be a great thing. Social media amplifies bad business as opposed to fixing it.

I hope so! And more importantly it is a well-designed well-visited blog?

I.E: My business increased X Amount, I Had X PR Opportunities, Met X People, Recruited X People.

There are several techniques of improving SEO with the help of social media. Make sure that they understand the latest Google algorithm, what is rewarded and punished. They should also be aware of the latest social algorithms and policies. Google Analytics should be part of this discussion.

More than sharing funny photos of the keg stand in college, a good consultant shows how they use/have used it for business.

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.

This answers two questions at once. Has the candidate done the research on your company ahead of time, and how well versed they are in the various social platforms. Pay attention if they mention demographics, style or frequency of messaging, and overall strategy.

Hopefully the answer here is yes. With deliverables, goals, room for experimentation, and more.

The way they define ‘crisis’ can tell you a lot about how much experience they have. If they haven’t had a real crisis in their own experience, they should at least be familiar with some famous brand reputation blunders. Dealing with negative comments or reviews properly is vital to this position, ask for examples.

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.

Social media press release should be like

☛ Main body should be the core of your press release, always write a press release in the third person
☛ Try to cover or answer for who, when, why what, where and how in your press release
☛ Try to avoid a sentence giving opinion
☛ Try to give a neutral viewpoint that delivers newsworthy content
☛ Try to limit your press release to one to two pages
☛ It’s always good to put keywords into your content but should not exceed the limit
☛ Give a referral to the statistics or sources relevant to your press release
☛ It includes videos, RSS and visual links to images

☛ Use twitter chats or #B2B chat on twitter every Thursday or #pr20 chat, which a weekly exploration of social media’s exploration on public relations
☛ Use Pitch-engine, to create a pitch and share your release or news directly with the customers
☛ Use PRX builder, also known as Social Media Release is a simple tool that help you to write your content, add images and video, insert links, etc.
☛ Use CNW’s Social Media Release, it gives online audience a platform to visit for multi-media content and conversation about your message

If the answer is “YES” that could be a warning flag. The bottom line is you probably don’t need to be on every site under the sun.

Everyone has failures, some larger than others. Of course, what you really want to know, is how they dealt with it. Gain insight into their coping skills and how they deal with negatives by seeing how the issue was resolved. Pay attention to what they did (or didn’t do) to ensure that the failure wouldn’t happen again.

Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill.

Usually, a press release is written in the third person while a pitch letter is directly addressed to journalist. It starts with a striking opening that alerts journalist to take immediate interest in the topic.

Public relation specialist:
☛ The role of PR is to get free publicity for organization or person
☛ You have no control how the media presents your information. They are not obligated to show your event or press release on your demand
☛ Whatever you sent to the editor, it will be published only for once
☛ Third party will look at the ad differently and create a great amount of credibility for clients product
☛ In public relations, you have to look for news and be able to generate business through that news

Advertisement:
☛ The company pays for ad space, and you will know exactly when that ad will publish
☛ You have total control how you want to present your ad
☛ Since you are paying for the ad, you can request for your ads over and over
☛ When target audience read the ad, they will see your ad as business oriented
☛ You get to exercise creativity in creating new ad campaigns and materials

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.

If they tell you “Yes!” right away, that is warning flag. Every business is different. Traditional advertising still could be a big component. Other forms of marketing such as events, etc. can be amplified and integrated with social media. Plus social media is ONE component of the online marketing world (other important ones include SEO and maybe pay-per-click campaigns depending on the client/goals.

☛ Post in Twibes groups (Twitter groups)
☛ Post on Facebook corporate page as well as other relevant pages
☛ Post in relevant professional blogs
☛ Post in relevant LinkedIn groups
☛ Post in corporate Twitter Account
☛ Post in Digg, Del.icio.us and other sharing groups

An interactive PR is a process that uses the internet as a mean to communicate messages to the public. The various segments comprising of interactive PR includes

☛ Search Engine
☛ Social Media Marketing
☛ Online Press Release
☛ Podcasting
☛ Webinars
☛ Web 2.0 technologies
☛ Developing blogs

☛ Good communication skill
☛ Ready for travelling
☛ Person who are enthusiastic, confident and understanding
☛ Willing to work according to client or organization schedule
☛ Good judgement
☛ Outgoing personality
☛ Creativity

This is a hypothetical question, but it’s also something guaranteed to happen at some point as it has happened before. This position requires a thorough understanding of these kind of changes and strategies for dealing with them when they do.

☛ What are some of the challenges explaining social media to non-technical executives? How do you overcome objections about social media?
☛ If you were working at a firm which blocked employee access to Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites, do you think this is a good policy? If not, how would you convince the executive team to open up access for employees?
☛ What is the difference between moderating something and facilitating something?
☛ What are your strengths in social media?
☛ What are your weaknesses in social media?
☛ Which social bookmarking sites do you use?
☛ What social media tools do you use?
☛ What is your biggest mistake you’ve made in social media? How did you fix it?
☛ Have you ever held a live event in the social space? How would you market a live online event? How would you structure the event?
☛ How do you manage an online reputation? If one of our executives had a bad online reputation (bad press, etc) and wanted to fix it, what would you recommend?
☛ If we had a business crisis, what social media channels would you use to communicate through? How would you manage the messaging?
☛ What areas of social media would you recommend outsourcing?
☛ What are the risks with becoming involved in social media?
☛ Which is the best social check-in site?
☛ Are you the mayor of any place?
☛ What do you do offline to increase your online knowledge?

☛ For our business, would Twitter or Facebook be more effective?
☛ Why would we want to continue using MySpace?
☛ Why should we use social media?
☛ What would be the first thing you would do if hired for this position? What would your goal be for the first month? The first year?
☛ Would you use Facebook Like or Facebook Recommend on our site?
☛ What social sites should our company have a presence on?
☛ How would you integrate social media into our site? What buttons or widgets would you recommend?
☛ What percentage of our referral traffic would you think our site should get from social media sites?
☛ Give our company a grade on our current social media efforts.
☛ How would a social check in site benefit our business?
☛ What tabs should we have on our company Facebook page? Which one should be default?
☛ How do you define social media reach? What is the current social media reach our of our company?
☛ What are 5 things you would recommend to us to do immediately in the social space?

☛ How do you measure success on social media?
☛ What metrics do you use to measure the effectiveness of social media?
☛ How would you tell that a social media campaign has failed?
☛ What key performance indicators would you recommend to report on social media efforts?
☛ Write down a table of contents for a social media strategy.
☛ What elements should go into a social media marketing plan?
☛ Why would we want to pay for social media advertising?
☛ What are the best types of things to advertise on a social networking site?
☛ What analytics software packages have you used?
☛ Describe the most successful social media campaign you have ever seen. What made it so successful? Could you duplicate that level of success?
☛ Describe a social media campaign you ran from start to finish.
☛ Provide an example of a social media campaign you are current running. Show me what channels it is in. Describe the next steps for your campaign.
☛ What are the elements that make a video go viral?