10 Social Media Interview Questions & Answers
Social Media agencies are dime a dozen for some time now and so are the social media gurus / experts / strategists / specialists available in the job market. As someone with experience building strong social media teams from the ground up, I had interviewed hundreds of candidates for social media job openings right from content writers, FTEs, Social media leads, supervisors to managers. When I started with it, I have to admit that I had made terrible decisions and on-boarded wrong guys for the team. But over the years with more experience, I had come up with a list of top 10 social media interview questions that really works for me. I had also give answers or hints to each of these questions – by this, I don’t tell that these are the only answers to these social media interview questions, but rather some bullet points to get you started with your thought process. After all, no article can replace your experience and exposure to social media projects.
1. How will you assess the social media presence of a company?
The answer to this question should go beyond the Facebook ‘Likes’. The points to cover can include:
- The social media channels in which the company currently maintains official profiles (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc.)
- Relevance of these channels to the company’s vertical (industry)
- Followership of these social media profiles
- Frequency of content publication
- Type of content – text / imagery based etc.
- Level of audience engagement the posts enjoy
2. What are the factors you will look into when you audit the social media profile of your client’s competitors?
A good social media audit should analyse the competitors as well. All the factors listed above for question 1 can ideally fit for competitive audit as well.
3. How profiling out the target audience is important for social media projects?
Target audience is the key to any social media endeavor. They are the consumers of your content. It is very important to identify who they are in terms of age group, gender, marital status, education, profession etc.
Once the target audience are profiled, then is important to find what their interests are, why they are in social networks, the channels they are present in, what type of content will attract and engage them.
Only with deep inputs into this, right type of content plan can be prepared for social media profiles.
In our in house social media projects, Target audience profile is an important document that is prepared during the strategy phase.
Below is a sample, very high level target audience profile of an online yoga service provider based out of US:
4. How various social media channels can be utilized by businesses?
Talk about major social media channels such as how LinkedIn can be an excellent channel for B2B companies, Pinterest for Fashion & Apparels, Facebook as a central social media hub, and Twitter as an excellent amplification tool.
The above is just an idea to get you started. You definitely have to expand more on this with your exposure and thoughts.
An example of social media channels and roles suitable for the same online yoga service provider I had cited in an answer above:
5. What are the types of media that you typically roll out to social media channels?
Explain how you would make use of the five atoms of media in your social media posts. If you want to know the 5 key elements of media, they are – audio, video, copy (text), images and motion graphics.
6. Do you use content calendar for your clients?
Content calendar helps the social media stake holders of a brand to prepare in advance what type of posts come in what days of the week or dates of the month. Large brands have tedious approval mechanisms before a social media post can finally see the light of the day and this where a content calendar helps as an excellent tool.
Imagine a monthly or weekly calendar with short, one line topics across top social media channels filled out – this is how exactly a social media calendar looks like. An example (minus the social media channels across the days) is given below:
And here is how the topic plan is devised to fill the content calendar for the same yoga trainer cited in the examples so far:
7. What are the KPIs and Metrics that you recommend to measure success of social media programs?
Again, don’t lose out here by just talking about Facebook ‘likes’. Talk about metrics on Audience Engagement, metrics on Outcomes of Social Media projects. Avinash Kaushik explains how to measure outcomes in terms of macro conversions (sales) and micro conversions (brochure downloads, contact form submissions etc.) in this non-parallel article.
An example of social media metrics:
8. What are all the constituents of a good social media post?
This might vary from interviewer to interviewer but I will look out for the following factors when my teams asks my approval for publishing a social media post:
- Does the post start with attention grabber that capture the wandering eyeballs of our reputed target audience? Many times (but not always), posts that start with a question can gain visitor attention.
- Does the post have a conversational tone?
- Does the post have a call to action? Of course, I don’t get paranoid with it all the times. I definitely believe not all social media posts should have a brand-focused agenda.
9. Do you have experience providing response to social media clients on your client’s behalf?
Many huge brands bifurcate social media into two parts – one is social media marketing which is about branding and managing the social media profiles whereas the other one is about social media monitoring to identify customer sentiment and opinions about the brand or its products. In this setup they have dedicated teams that provide swift response to deserving social media comments be it a pat or a complaint.
But many SMBs cannot afford the budget associated with it and if you are the only team that is involved with your client’s social media, then it pays for you and your client if you monitor their social media profiles for any user comments, not to mention, provide a suitable response or escalate.
If possible, attend demos of some social monitoring tools and gather ideas around it.
10. How do you fine tune the social media program for your clients on an ongoing basis?
Here, I will want to hear about how you plan to revise the content types / content structure etc., based on the recent audience engagement metrics. Expand more on this with your own exposure and experience.
Do you want to add more questions or answers to this list? You are welcome, please leave them below in the comment section.
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