Social Media Specialist Interview Preparation Guide

Interview questions about the future should be brought back to accomplishments of the past. In other words, when asked about how you would deal with possible future scenarios, refer to your past accomplishments. Your answers should focus on successful campaigns with statement such as, “While I was with company XYZ, I initiated both low cost lead generation strategies and several viral marketing campaigns, using an almost inexistent budget to boost profits by 200%.”

Not all audiences are the same. Knowing the benefits of a targeted audience for a marketing campaign is as important as knowing how to create such an audience for the company where you want to work. Take the time to identify how you can target the company's ideal audience before the interview.

“6 months ago”. Yeah. OK. Bye.

“2 years ago”. Hey, not bad. Worth a chat.

“In 1992”. Er. Um. They’d better be referencing BBSes and Usenet.

“Oh, I read this book I bought from Amazon.com”. Wargh. By the time that book went to print it was out of date. No go.

“I’m always learning”. Good answer.

“I read a lot of blogs, and try to use as many different tools as I can”. Also good.

“I go to conferences”. Yeahhhhhh. Might be OK. Answers to the other 9 questions should tell you.

The ideal candidate will talk about industry news and trending topics, and explain how to use Google AdWords to find topics that will drive the most traffic to your website.

Twitter is not about telling the world how great you are. Show the interviewer you know that by explaining to him how to cleverly use Twitter hash tags and handles to turn Tweeple into tribes. Talk about links and how they are components of successful tweets as they convert into click throughs and shares.

Blog posts, website content, press releases, guest articles, email campaigns, proposals, social content: you have to be able to craft your ideas and messages to fit any medium. A good social media manager needs to be able to produce engaging, relevant and sharable content, pleasing search engines as well as humans. It’s to your advantage to show some of your previous blog posts.

Writing blogs has become a day-to-day occurrence for a lot of businesses now, so it can pretty important for you to have some blog writing experience. If you haven’t, try and start now – you can set your own blog up on simple platforms like WordPress or Blogger or you could write blogs and post them on LinkedIn and other websites that relate to your subject area. This is a brilliant way to show off your writing skills and how you can engage a reader.

Just like your previous social media roles, make sure you’ve got some stats at the ready, so that you can tell your prospective employer how successful the blog has been.

Every social network is not right for every industry. Just ask anyone in the pharmaceutical industry how they could possibly engage in drug marketing on Twitter. The reality is that most organizations can take full advantage of the networks out there, but if there are limitations, you want your social media professional to be aware of them.

This is another key question that tests your knowledge of the industry and of the differences between platforms. “Not all channels are created equal,” Juliette explains. “You can’t just post something across all channels and have it be the same,” she adds. When she asks this question while interviewing potential candidates at Birchbox, it’s because she wants to know that candidates have a detailed understanding of each platform and can develop strategies that are specific to each one. “I really want to get an understanding from you that you have done your research on these channels, that you are a practitioner on these channels and you know what works and what doesn’t work on each one.”

To answer this question, give an example of a post that you think would perform well on a company’s Facebook page and another post that would do well on Instagram. Then explain why they would be successful on their specific channels.