Social Media Specialist

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.

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%.”

“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 By the time that book went to print it was out of date.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.

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.

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.

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.

Any professional worth their salt will do some preliminary research before sitting down with you. If the person you interview doesn’t know (at least at a high level) what your competitors are doing, it might be a cause for concern. IMHO, they should be able to give you insight on the way your competitors are using the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Social media “experts” are quickly becoming a dime-a-dozen. There are thousands of self-proclaimed experts out there, but you need a professional who knows your business and cares about your success. Be sure that the person you engage as your company/brand representative knows what sets them apart from their competition.

As you answer questions about your accomplishments with other companies, be specific. Simply stating, “I ran several online marketing campaigns” does not adequately show what you can do for the company. Better answers should resemble, “I started a social media campaign that utilized targeted advertising systems to market the company’s services to youth in North America.” You will also need to elaborate. Use numbers that support the campaign, such as “Within three financial quarters, sales increased by 427% and brand recognition vastly improved by 10% within the target demographic.”

If the expert answers ‘no’, that may be OK. If they look at you blankly, end the meeting there. No sense wasting your time.

If the expert answers ‘yes’, get the address and go look. If they’ve been blogging for less than 2-3 years, and there’s no explanation like “I had to move my blog”, again, end the meeting.

Any social media expert has been somehow participating in the conversation for a long time.

Sending content into the world isn’t enough. Candidates should know how to monitor and analyze content by tracking social media shares and using Google Analytics to evaluate the success of each piece.

Of course, finding a well-rounded candidate doesn’t stop with those questions — you’ll need to dig deeper to find the perfect fit for your team. For a full list of questions, the ideal responses, and evaluation criteria, download Curata’s Content Marketing Interview Template.

“Voting something to the front page of Digg using my proxy server and 35 computers”. Flee the scene, and get to a minimum safe distance as soon as possible. The Digg brigade may be on its way. Whatever you do, don’t hire them. While this is a valid tactic (I guess), it’s not a campaign. Nor does it generate long term results in most cases.

“Developing a great message and then reaching out to people, while giving them an incentive to ‘pass it on'”. Yeah, OK, keep ’em around.

“I have this great software that will put a link to your site on 21,000 forums and 10,000 blogs…”. Push them down the garbage chute. Don’t be seen with them in public.

“Huh?” Hopefully your next step is obvious.

“Google alerts”. Not bad, but wait and see if they add in stuff like subscribing to Twitter searches and the like.

“I use a 3rd party tool”. Fine, but make sure they do more than plug in some keywords and wait for e-mails. A human being needs to review what the tool reports or its worthless.

It’s important to understand candidates’ thought process when it comes to generating ideas or deciding which are worth pursuing. You want someone who has a plan for surfacing the best ideas rather than relying on a supervisor to tell them what to do.

ROI is measured by industry specific goals, such as lead generation, increasing brand awareness, decreasing recruitment costs, and so on ROI metrics may include website blog traffic, email subscriptions, and the number of mentions. After establishing what your online marketing goals are, you then assign financial values to each goal.