1. Please explain how do you measure social return on investment (ROI)?
Use tools like the Conversion Measurement tool on Facebook and Optimized CPM. Your website will also often have analytics used to measure social media ROI. Lastly, some of the platforms themselves such as LinkedIn have their own analytics. The fundamental measures are the same as in other areas of marketing: clicks, likes, shares, purchases, change in attitude, etc.
2. Explain how much SEO knowledge and experience do you have?
SEO is a desireable skill for social media marketers and marketers in general since companies always want their content to rank as high as possible on a Google search. Explain how social media helps make this happen by boosting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs…you should know what these are!), making content more share-worthy and perhaps even viral, stressing keywords, and by simply increasing the amount of content attached to a brand. Talk about how you always factor SEO into any social media strategy and detail exactly how you did it in the past.
3. Explain me what are our competitors doing on social media?
It's ok to praise the competitors here if they are genuinely doing something good. Don't go overboard and make it seem like you'd rather work for these competitors but don't be afraid to be honest if you think they have a strategy that the company you're interviewing for could learn from. Always be sure to explain why what they are doing is working (or not working). Mention specific social media campaigns if you can.
4. Explain me how do you measure social media success?
Use various tools to check the site optimization, the parameters to check the success of social media success are
☛ Rise in the number of followers
☛ Increase in the number of leads
☛ Number of Inbound links to your site through social sites
☛ Number of bloggers comment, social shares and traffic generated
☛ Increase in the total sales made online
☛ Number of Posts published
☛ Conversion- Number of subscription
☛ Account Creation
☛ Query form submission
5. Explain me how you can use Facebook for Conversion Measurement?
For Conversion Measurement in Facebook, you can use the feature “ Conversion Pixel”. Which is nothing but a piece of code that you paste in your website, and it will measure the conversion rate of the product or service you render.
Facebook tracks conversion for adverts that happens within 1 day, 7 days and 28 days after a person click on advert and also for viewing an advert
6. Besides Social Site how you can optimize your content?
Besides social sites, there are a number of other communities like Social Buzz Club, Viral Content Buzz, Triberr, etc. that brings together content creators and enhance their social media promotion.
7. Have they ever had to handle a social media/online reputation crisis?
Ask them to define what that means to them and what steps they would take to resolve a situation.
If the company doesn't have a “best practices” protocol in place, it's time to get one. This would be included in your Social Media Policy and should emulate your current conflict resolution process.
8. What strategies would you implement for helping generating leads (or conversions)?
Share the facts! Talk about successful strategies you have used in other projects. You may also describe strategies you think could be useful to their company in particular.
9. How does success in social media look like for you?
Try to find out what their expectations are so you are aligned from the very beginning.
People love to see original video content that is fun and sharable. It shouldn't be so obviously promotional from the start. People should want to share it simply because it is amazing! This video content ultimately connects to all the other social media platforms you are working with and benefits strategy and marketing as a whole.
11. Can you describe your biggest social media failure?
Everybody makes mistakes, it's not a big deal. Be completely honest about this and focus on what you learned from your bad experiences. Tell your negative stories, too. Also, mention how you corrected it and the changes you made to avoid it from happening again in the future.
Ask your candidate to define the difference between the two.
Social marketing environment calls for a more conversational approach. Most social media conversations don't revolve around sales. Your candidate should be able to recognize where someone is in their purchase journey and guide them to their destination.
Social customer service environment requires empathy, patience, and the ability to resolve conflict. Your candidate must be able to recognize situations that may call for an escalation to management. Remember: they're not just responding to that one customer, but for an audience of future customers!
13. Explain some tips to increase your reach on Facebook?
To increase your reach on Facebook you can consider following tips
☛ Improve your Facebook EdgeRank -> It determines which of your post get most visibility in your fans newsfeed
☛ Stop using third-party tools -> Don't use any third party tools for scheduling posts and posting to social media
☛ Get your likes up -> Use like-gating in which likes are given in exchange for access to content such as free download
☛ Buy some Ads -> Buying some ads can be a smart move
☛ Keep building your own Email list and Website -> Make direct contact to fans by building your own e-mail list and website.
14. Basic SMM Executive Job Interview Questions:
☛ What is Web 2.0?
☛ What does Web 3.0 look like?
☛ What's the “next big thing?”
☛ What is the difference between social media and social networking?
☛ What do you think of social media consultants?
☛ What's the scariest part of social media?
☛ What's the most exciting part of social media?
☛ What social media blogs do you read? What research do you follow?
☛ Who's your favorite social media expert?
15. Role-specific SMM Executive Job Interview Questions:
☛ 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?
16. Technical SMM Executive Job Interview Questions:
☛ 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?
17. Company Based SMM Executive Job Interview Questions:
☛ 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?
18. Analytics & Marketing Based SMM Executive Job Interview Questions:
☛ 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?
19. General SMM Executive Job Interview Questions:
☛ 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?
20. Explain me what is the responsibility of social media manager?
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.
21. Ask them what marketing strategies they plan to use to generate leads?
You need to know how social media is giving you something quantifiable for your money. Social Media ROI = Number of Leads.
Social media marketing strategies that generate leads require social advertising. Each platform has its strengths but, in most cases, Facebook ads offer the biggest opportunities.
22. How is the business' presence on social media nowadays?
Show interest on which social media channels they are using and their strategy for each.
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. If you have your own awesome anecdote already, that's even better!
A great community manager should be proficient in most of the social media platforms and social media management tools we've mentioned so far. He/she should have unrivaled communications skills and be likeable and organized. Employers also value a background in analytics even if those analytics were not directly related to social media.
25. Tell me what Social Media platform(s) are best for your business? (and have them explain why)?
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.
