SMM Executive

Hiring a social media manager can be quite a challenge. Social media reaches people, fosters conversations and your social media manager must develop a funnel for leads and sales from those relationships.

Social media is an integral part of online marketing strategy, which also includes content marketing and SEO.

A lot of people are trying to capitalize on this booming market so here’s a shocker:

Not everyone who says they can do social media marketing have actually done it successfully!

When you’re ready to hire (or promote) your social media manager, take advantage of these 10 questions to ask your candidate. Their answers will inform your decision and help you pick the right person.

☛ Describe the structure of your current marketing team. What is everyone’s role? Who do you report to?

☛ Discuss the relationship between social media and content marketing.

☛ Social media functionality is constantly evolving. How do you stay updated?

☛ What’s the relationship between social media and brand-building?

☛ What social channels do you prefer and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

☛ What other social media platforms do you use on your own time?

☛ What strategies would you recommend for building a social following?

☛ How would you describe the brand voice of your current company?

☛ How would you describe your company’s visual identity?

☛ What tools do you prefer for scheduling, content curation, project management, social listening, etc?

☛ How have you used social media for customer support?

☛ What’s the relationship between social media and sales?

☛ How would you present the results of your work?

☛ How would you encourage the creation of user-generated content?

☛ How do you integrate social media with offline events?

☛ Describe a time you interacted with an angry customer on social media.

☛ How would you handle negative comments about your brand on social media?

☛ What have you noticed about our current social presence? What could we improve?

☛ Explain the difference between Facebook Like and Sharing on Facebook.

☛ If you’re planning a vacation and will be out of touch and not able to get online for a week, what tools would you use to ensure social media updates are being posted?

☛ Write three headlines for news stories that you think will have tremendous success on social media. What makes the headline successful? Write a headline for a successful article about our company.

☛ How often should we update Twitter?

☛ How do you handle criticism of a company online?

☛ What would you do if someone started a parody account poking fun at our company?

☛ What is your policy for moderating comments?

☛ Would you pay a blogger to write favorably about our company?

☛ How would you show unique content only to fans on our Facebook page?

☛ Who in our organization should be blogging on behalf of the company?

☛ What is a “sneezer”?

☛ How would you perform competitive analysis in the social space?

☛ What do think about software applications that autofollow or try to get get large masses of friends on social network sites?

☛ What do the statistics look like for a healthy Facebook fan page?

☛ Explain what a retweet is.

☛ What is RSS? Why is it important?

☛ Have you ever gotten a piece of content onto the front page of Digg?

☛ How frequently do you update Facebook and Twitter?

☛ 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?

☛ 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?

Social media manager implements the company’s social media marketing. The Job role includes-

☛ Developing company’s content strategy

☛ Creating relevant content

☛ Blogging

☛ Community participation and leadership

☛ Promotion strategy on social sites

☛ Monitor, listen and respond to users in a “Social” way while cultivating sales and leads

☛ Develop and expand community or blogger outreach efforts

☛ Create, design and manage promotions and social ad campaigns

☛ Identify threats and report notable threats to appropriate management

☛ Respond to social media crisis or negative comment scenario

☛ Define strategies to enhance or build the follower fan base

The role Social media manager may also be called Social Media Specialist/ Strategist / Analyst / Executive or Intern. Irrespective of the name, the job profile will remain the same.