SME

☛ How do you energize the community?

☛ How would you handle user/customer complaints?

☛ How do you personalize a large scale social presence?

☛ What’s the difference between targeted and large audiences? Which is better? Why?

☛ How do you monitor comments and brand mentions on social media sites?

☛ How do you identify brand advocates?

☛ How would you use Google+ communities?

☛ How do you define engagement?

☛ Which social media sites do you recommend for businesses? Why?

☛ What social sites do you use personally? Why?

☛ How does your personal social media presence impact your employer?

☛ What social media pages or profiles have you created and managed in the past?

☛ What conversation domains do you focus on?

☛ What is a limitation you experienced on a social media platform? How did you surpass it?

☛ How do you measure the ROI of a specific social media campaign?

☛ Do you have experience with Google Analytics?

☛ Does social media affect SEO? How?

☛ What social media monitoring, analytics and publishing tools do you use?

☛ What type of experience did you have at your previous job with analytics, trends, etc., and how did you improve website traffic?

☛ How do you monitor trending topics?

☛ Who are the leading topic influencers in this industry?

☛ How do you stay current on all the shifts and innovations in social media?

☛ Are there any hot new social media platforms on the horizon we should be aware of?

In this section of the interview, you will learn how involved the candidate is in the industry. Is he/she looking for a job or a career?

☛ 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?

☛ What are you passionate about?

☛ How would you add value to our social media department?

☛ Which social media experts or influencers do you follow?

☛ How would you handle a crisis on social media?

☛ What are some of best practices on social media?

☛ Which social media brand strategy has inspired you? Why?

☛ What innovative things are our competitors doing on social media?

Social media engagement doesn’t end when you publish your Facebook page or launch your Twitter account. Heck…creating those channel profiles is often the easiest part of the process. The community engagement/management process that follows is the more difficult (and more expensive) element. It’s important that you know how your social media professional approaches community management and what strategies and tactics they will use to interact with the members of your community (a.k.a your customers, members, employees, etc…)

“I hate writing”. Cough.

“Oh, I try to but I don’t have much time”. Cough. Cough.

“Every day”. A winner!

Facebook EdgeRank is the algorithm Facebook uses to determine where posts show up in a user’s newsfeed. It is important every Facebook post has the highest EdgeRank possible. How can you use affinity, user interactions, and timeliness to increase a post’s EdgeRank?

Every business and organization is not the same, so a one-size-fits-all social media strategy is generally a bad idea. If you’re in non-profit, you might want to look for a social media professional with experience in that sector. If you operate in a regulated industry such as pharmaceutical, tobacco, alcohol, finance, insurance, or a host of others….it would be a good idea to find a professional who has significant experience in your industry and understands any limitations or restrictions.

Groups tend to have a better reach and are therefore a more worthy place for sharing content. They also offer an excellent space for engaging with customers and other businesses, stresing keywords, and increasing interest in your company. A LinkedIn Page is where people go when they are already interested in the company. Thus, it should be informative above all else. Pages also function as a feed for putting out content and have at least a bit of SEO value.

If you’re applying for a social media job, then your prospective employer will probably want to see/hear about what you’ve done in the past. They’ll want to see how you can use social media on a commercial level – so this is a brilliant chance for you to showcase your talents.

A great way to tackle this question would be to tell them about a project you’ve ran or assisted with and talk about the success of this. Remember to focus on stats in particular – if you increased the engagement of your social media platform, make sure you state by how much. You want to wow your potential employer by your past achievements, so make sure you’ve got some stats at the ready.

The answer for this questions proves you have spent time researching the company’s current social media campaigns, and have taken the time to find workable solutions for any problems with the current campaign.

“Oh, shut up”. Perfectly OK, especially if the expert turns purple for a moment first. They’re just sick of hearing this question, which means they’ve been around the block a few times.

“It’s complicated, but here’s a high-level view…”. Nice!!!

“I track clicks from Twitter”. Nope, sorry.

Social media managers need to know how to define success for social media campaigns. Do you utilize social media campaign tools such as Klout? How do you use KPIs and analytics to prove the success of your campaigns? Need to add some tools to your kit? Check out this post.

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.

“It doesn’t”. Slap them and tell ’em that’s from Ian.

“It builds links”. That’s half the answer.

“It builds relationships that turn into links later”. HIRE THEM NOW.