Social Media Marketing- Interview Questions

Social media marketing is a practice that consists of using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others, in order to promote products or services to gain traffic and customers.

Social media benefits businesses in a variety of ways, the most important of which is establishing a dialogue with customers. Social media enables customers or consumers to communicate directly with brands, forever changing the way organizations must operate.

Authenticity is key. No matter the type of company you’re interviewing with, whether their audience is businesses or consumers, it’s important to be genuine. By doing so, brands can establish their trustworthiness to their audiences.

The question is most commonly asked during an interview for a social media manager.

The answer to this question can vary, depending on whether the organization is a B2B or B2C company. Prepare yourself to answer based on the type of company you’re interviewing with.

This question is designed to help sort social media enthusiasts from social media managers. Be sure you understand and can describe a variety of social media marketing best practices.

Unsurprisingly, this question can vary depending on the type of organization you’re interviewing with. Research their business and social media presence, and answer this question with your recommendations based on what you’ve learned about their organization.

Some of the most common ways to inspire people to retweet include learning the best times of day to tweet, connecting with more Twitter users, including images, and ensuring you leave enough characters for retweeters to respond (this should be much easier to do now that Twitter allows 280 characters).

By using LinkedIn Groups, most companies can help establish themselves as thought leaders in their field.

The answer to this question depends on the organization. You can answer this question in a general way by describing a variety of scenarios, including:

If the goal is conversion, track content downloads, online sales, webinar registrations, online lead generation form submissions, and so forth. These metrics help you understand how many people took action as a result of each.

If the goal is engagement, learn how many people participate in the conversation: how many comments, replies, reposts or retweets are the posts generating?

If the goal is awareness, look at reach, volume, and exposure to learn how widely your message is spreading.

If the goal is driving traffic to the website, track clicks, URL shares, and conversions, along with the path people are using to enter various pages on your website.

To answer this social media interview question, you should have a sound knowledge of all the company’s services. Your answer will determine how much you know about the company and its USPs.

Be prepared to share actual numbers. Let your interviewer know whether you are describing a scenario where you were able to grow traffic by yourself, or whether you were a contributor to a team.

This answer depends entirely on your previous experience. Be prepared to provide your interviewer with specific examples of what has worked well in the past. Start out with a summary of the type of company or brand you were working with so that your interviewer has the right context.

Here is another question that depends on you. You might describe a piece of content you wrote yourself or one you saw online that caught your eye. What made it your favorite? Was it the design? The information it provided?

There are a lot of tools that companies can use for social media marketing. You should know how to use the most common ones, and be aware of other tools. For example, tools used by a company with just five employees might be different than the tools a large corporation might use. You shouldn’t need to know every feature of every tool, or every single technique—just describe what you know.

Pro tip: Ask your interviewer what tools they use, so you’ll know what you need to learn before you start the job.

This question is a variant of the popular “what is your proudest accomplishment” question, and is almost guaranteed to be a question you’ll face in an interview. Be ready for this one by outlining the basics of the campaign. If you can’t memorize all the details, bring some notes to refer to.

With this question, your interviewer is looking to learn how you handle failure, whether or not it was your fault directly. Sometimes a small mistake that was overlooked—a broken URL in a call-to-action, for example—can spell disaster for social media. This question is another that you’ll most likely encounter, so prepare your response in advance.

When you are applying for social media positions in a company, you must know about their social media game. Check out all their channels thoroughly before your social media interview. It is also essential to derive insights and create a list of feedback based on your observations. This will help the interviewer understand your experience.

Social media managers depend on software tools for many different aspects of the job. The specific applications they use aren’t particularly important (though it’s nice if they have experience with the same systems used by your organization), but they should be aware of their purpose.

Here are some areas that candidates are likely to mention, as well as specific examples of popular social media tools:

Analytics tools: Google Analytics, Snaplytics, HubSpot

Listening tools: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Keyhole

Scheduling tools: Sendible, Buffer, TweetDeck

In any role, it’s advantageous for employees to enjoy the work they do—motivation is usually a strong indicator of performance, and this is no different in social media management. Whether it’s the thrill of connecting with influencers, the excitement of working in a fast-growing field, or simply the joy of creating engaging content, candidates should be able to explain what brings them to the role, and, by inference, why they’re suited to it.

SEO (search engine optimization) is an essential concept in digital marketing. It refers to how well a website ranks in search engines. Often, the role of social media in SEO is overlooked—but strong candidates won’t make that mistake.

Social media can (indirectly) improve search engine rankings. Look out for answers that touch on any of the following:

Linking to website content in social media posts
Having posts shared by other users
Building an active social media following that buys into your web content
Optimizing social media profiles
Optimizing images in social media posts

Posting at the right time is key to maximizing reach. Even the most compelling special offers or insightful posts will struggle if they’re published at a bad time.

Choosing when to schedule a new post is a careful calculation that’s often planned days or even weeks in advance. These decisions are based on a variety of factors including the user base’s timezone and the style of content.

Experienced social media managers will use data analytics to find out when their users are most active on social media and post accordingly. For example, this could be during the morning commute, or in the evening after work.

Brand identity should be embedded succinctly within every social media post, across all social media channels. This encompasses things like tone of voice, branding, and message. Over time, a consistent brand image allows companies to distinguish themselves from competitors.

Before candidates can effectively communicate brand identity, they first need to learn about it in detail, familiarizing themselves with the company’s audience, core values, and mission statement.

Armed with this knowledge, they will then be able to craft posts that convey all of these brand elements.

The answer to look out for here is data. Social media managers now have such a vast range of analytics tools at their disposal that track everything from demographics to purchasing habits.

Your company likely already has a lot of information on file; a good place to start for candidates will be to look through the archives. Beyond that, they can use social listening tools, research competitors, and survey your customers to learn about them on a deeper level.

The aim is to create a detailed audience profile that covers everything from location and interests to stage of life and spending power. The more detail, the better you can target your posts on social media.