Social Media Manager

Ask them to describe the “personality” of your company brand in 3 words. They should have done research on your company and your customers before assessing the potential across today’s social media channels. Facebook, Twitter, your company blog, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube are awesome channels and each has different marketing tactics.

This is another question where there is no right answer. Be prepared to explain why you picked your sites though. If you don’t follow any blogs, try browsing a few so you’ll at least be prepared for this question.

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.

Contrary to popular thinking, ROI can always be measured in social media. But it can be perceptual. What are your goals? Were they achieved? If so, then you had a positive ROI. Did your campaigns help your business in any way or have any positive effects? If they did, then you were successful.

Social media ROI is not always tied to tangible business benefits. Ask the social media manager which factors can be measured and how they will be reported to demonstrate the value they bring to your business.

As with the previous question, this answer depends on each company and on the specific needs they have. Again, you should investigate what they have done in the past on their social networks and also what they could improve. Hint: Make sure to share reachable and measurable goals.

Most every tweet should include a link to something; whether it be an article, a page to enter a give-a-way, or a photo/video, tweets should be thought of as a launchpad to something else where your followers can find more information about the tweet. Putting a link in your tweets adds value to your followers and it gives them the opportunity to engage with your tweet & brand. If your link is useful and/or desirable to them, they’ll undoubtedly pay even more attention to you once you’ve proven yourself as a good source of whatever it is they want.

Engagement, brand reach and lead generation is what helps show the ROI of social media to a business, these measurements show the results of your job. Show the interviewer that you are an expert analyzing the metrics and have solutions to improve them.

A solid answer you should look for would be something along the lines of ‘monitoring’ and/or ‘listening’ to your audiences within your social domains. It’s quite an ambiguous question, but the answers will provide insight into their general thinking about managing your social campaigns. The key word many fail to incorporate is social. If answers are not somewhat geared towards a social dynamic, then they have missed the point completely.

This should highlight the extent of your potential social media managers Google+ knowledge. Google indexes Google+ content faster than content posted anywhere else. It’s a platform that has grown rapidly since its launch in 2011 and is now one of the main social platforms. A social media manager should know this and should understand whether your target audience is present there, thus viable for your business, and how Google+ can be leveraged to fulfill your wider marketing objectives.

Different social networks have different audiences and practices. Not every network is right for every business or industry. For example, how could a pharmaceutical company possibly engage in drug marketing on Twitter? The reality is that most businesses can take advantage of the networks out there in some way, but if there are limitations, you want your social media manager to be aware of them.

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.

Creating profiles and pages and then posting content to them isn’t the job – anyone can do that. The ability to build and engage with the community is the qualifying test of whether someone is a social media manager or a social media user.

You could just answer this by saying that you used a different platform to cover the shortcomings of the other. This isn’t a bad answer. In fact, it can be part of a good answer. However, you should definitely know how to overcome or at least deal with limitations on social media platforms. For example, Facebook has severe limitations when it comes to organic (non-paid) reach. One way to overcome this without paying on Facebook is to use email marketing and subscription-based methods to gently guide people to the page with links and suggestions (a strategy recommended by Facebook Marketing Expert Mari Smith).4 If you have your own awesome anecdote already, that’s even better!

Ask them to describe a plan for how best to allocate your budget and how they would know if it’s successful.

A typical budget consideration is for Facebook ads. Depending on your company and your market, a minimum $500/month is a good start.

Investment in social media and content marketing is prerequisite for success. There are 6 main ways you’re going to invest if you want to see ROI (return on investment):

☛ Financial

☛ Time

☛ Manpower

☛ Attention

☛ Monitoring, publishing and reporting software

☛ Training

To measure the ROI that you invested in social media, you can consider using tools like the Conversation Measurement Tool on Facebook and optimized CPM. You can also use Google Analytics or LinkedIn, which have their own analytics. The criteria remain same to track the traffic like clicks, shares, purchases, number of likes, etc. ROI metric may also include

☛ e-mail subscription

☛ Website blog traffic

☛ Webinar registration

☛ Registration for content downloads,etc.

A social media manager should know that social networks come with limitations; API calls, bandwidth limitations, character limits etc… If a social media manager has never run into limitations and hasn’t experienced how to overcome them, then this likely means that they are not very experienced. In fact, they will probably be completely new to the social media landscape. Asking how they overcome any hurdles with their past or current clients will give you a good indication of how they respond to adversity.

You don’t need to have as many followers as Justin Bieber or be like Gary Vaynerchuck to impress your employers. However, your following or at least your activity on social media channels should reflect your passion for it and act as a sample of your overall communication skills.