social media marketing interview questions and answers

social media marketing interview questions and answers 2018

 

Q What do you think of our current social media efforts? What could we be doing better?

A You want a professional who is deliberate and thoughtful. They should be able to articulate what they think is working well and what isn’t. If you have a strategy in place, they should be able to offer ways to build on it. If you don’t have one, they should be able to offer ideas that align with your business goals.

Q What metrics do you use to measure the success of your social campaigns?

A The two most important metrics for social media are engagements and leads. Whether they’re using Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or YouTube, a good social media specialist should be able to show quantifiable evidence that they’re reaching people who could become customers.

Q What channels do you think are most relevant to our business? How do you use each       channel differently?

A This question should give you a sense of how thoughtful the professional is and how well they know major social media channels. The real answer is that it depends on what your business goals are and where your community is. The job of a social media specialist is to find and grow that community using strategies tailored to each platform, whether that’s promoting a blog article on Facebook, using Twitter to field customer service requests, or sharing relevant content on Tumblr.

Q What tools do you use to manage your channels?

A Good social media manager won’t just blast content onto their channels. They will have a deliberate strategy behind their campaigns and use professional tools to monitor their effectiveness. Dashboards like Hootsuite and Sprout Social give social media specialists the ability to both manage channels and perform basic analytics from one interface.

Q Tell me about a successful social campaign you’ve run from beginning to end.

A Your social media specialist will be responsible for devising and executing campaigns, so you want to get some insight into how they approach their work. Great candidates should be able to articulate the problem they were trying to address, how they set goals, what tactics they used, and how they measured their results. It’s not necessary that the campaign was a smashing success, as long as the professional approached it in a deliberate way while gaining insights that helped them develop better campaigns in the future.

Q How do you use social media as a tool for customer service?

A This is an opportunity for the professional to demonstrate both their strategic thinking as well as their judgment and soft skills. A good social media specialist should be able to work with your CS team to make sure that they’re providing support that’s helpful and on-brand, and also recognize when it’s better to take the conversation off social media.

Q Say there’s a crisis on one of our social media channels. How do you handle it?

A Nobody likes it, but it’s a fact in today’s digital age: Sometimes things can go wrong on social media. A great social media expert can describe the steps they’d take to resolve the situation. If you have a set of best practices in place, they should follow that plan; if you don’t have one, they should help create it.

Q When is it better not to engage on social media?

A Again, it comes down to judgment. It might be tempting to respond to every negative comment on social media, but a good social media specialist will know how to distinguish between legitimate customer complaints and people who are just looking for attention.

Q What makes a piece of social media content successful?

A A social media strategy is only as good as the content it produces. To be successful, a social media strategist needs more than a flair for click-worthy headlines (though that certainly helps). They need an eye for relevant, shareable content. If they’ve managed a blog before, ask them to share some examples of articles they consider successful.

Q Give me a couple of examples of social media experiments you’d like to run with our business.

A There is no single solution when it comes to social media. Trends change, communities evolve. A good social media specialist is constantly looking for new ways to engage with their audience. They should also know how to use the results of their experiments to inform future campaigns.

 

Q. Importance of Social Media

Ans: Be very thorough with one of the most commonly asked social media questions. Since Social Media is highly customizable in nature with social media ads, it is important for every business, be it small or large. For instance, Facebook ads allow you to target users by things like industry, education level, location, history of purchases, and the pages they have liked.

Q. Do you know what Facebook Edgerank is? Why is it important?

Ans: Facebook Edgerank is the algorithm used by Facebook to determine whether your posts should be put up or not in the news feed of your page as well as your follower’s page and what should be their position.

Edgerank measures

• The affinity between you and your followers
• How links, video, images, and content engages the reader
• And the time of the post

All these aspects impact the marketing strategy of your Facebook Business page which makes it so important to understand Edgerank.

Q. What are the social media success tracking tools?

Ans: It is important to track the social media success to know if you are on the right track or not and if not, then what could be done to improvise the performance. The relevant metrics that could be used to track social media success are:

• Google Analytics

To measure how much traffic is being directed to your website from different social media channels.

• Quality and relevancy of content

By monitoring the unique page views, total pages viewed, and the time spent on a page can be used to review the quality of content.

• Observe the conversations about your company

The share of voice is nothing against conversations about your company vs that of your competitor’s. You can observe this by a simple yet effective formula i.e., company’s mentions on social media platforms and the mentions of your competitor’s name on the same.

You can use SocialMention, a free tool to track the names.

• Tracking with Social CRM tool

You can track the total size of community and engagement with the help of a social CRM tool.

• Tracking overall Social Media Returns

By adding up the total of your positive, negative, or neutral mentions, you can measure the social media returns over time.

Q. What KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) would you recommend to report on social media efforts?

Ans: There are various key performance indicators like Video or SlideShare views, Social Connections, Traffic Data, Mentions, Comments, Likes, Shares, Demographics and Location, the number of active followers, and more.

One should identify to determine the reach and engagement of the company on social platforms. By tracking the right KPIs, the company will be able to make adjustments to your social media budget and strategy.

 

 

Q. Is Google+ worth for using in a business?

Ans: Google+ provides a unique tool ‘Hangouts’ which helps a business to have video conversations with its followers at zero cost. If you regularly share high-quality content on Google+, it will get indexed instantly and thus, it becomes easier for one to rank their website on target keywords.

With +1s on Google+, the company will have a greater chance to have a higher ranking on Google.

It is also advisable to integrate the Google+ page with other platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and company’s website.

Q. What is RSS Feed and why it is crucial?

Ans: The full form of RSS is Rich Site Summary. RSS is an XML file. These feeds push content to company’s site and allow readers to subscribe to their feed.qu

Benefits of generating RSS Feed are

• Helps you get wider audiences for the content.
• It enables you in email subscriptions, feeding content to readers, and live bookmarking.

Q. What are the elements of a viral video?

Ans: Some of the elements necessary to make a video viral are:

• Deciding the audience before creating the content of the video.
• Making the first 20 seconds of a video compelling. These 20 seconds will influence the viewers whether to watch it further or not.
• Time relevance should be observed as it encourages the campaign’s viral potential.
• The video must be entertaining to the masses as well as universal.
• A catchy line or phrase must be there to hit the viewers’ thought process positively.
• Create attention-grabbing and compelling title with relevant tags to include widely searched key terms. An interest description will act as a teaser to the audience.
• Seed the video to journalists, influencers, and bloggers for whom it is most relevant to.

Q. In what ways can you measure social return on investment (ROI)?

Ans: You should know the company’s goals and objectives before starting to track and measure their social ROI. There are various ways in which it could be measured:

• Customer Acquisition
• Reach
• Traffic
• Lead Generation
• Revenue
• clicks
• Contest Entries

These are some factors you can use to measure social ROI. After establishing what is the marketing goal of the company, you shall then assign financial values to each goal.

Q. What are the best practices on Twitter?

Ans: Some of the best ways to use Twitter are:

• Using not more than 2 hashtags every tweet.
• Keeping the tweets around 100 characters. Make your tweets crisp and hitting.
• Schedule and plan your tweets with the help of Buffer or TweetDeck.
• With the help of Twitter Advanced search, you can manage your Twitter Marketing activities.
• Keeping a check on Twitter Analytics to know what could be done to improvise the strategy.

Q. How can you boost Facebook reach?

Some of the tips to increase your reach on Facebook are:

• Buy some ads
• Stop using 3rd party tools
• Improve your Facebook EdgeRank
• Keep building your own Website and Email list

 

Q. Why did you choose Social Media industry?

Ans: This is one of the most common social media questions for interview.

With this question, the recruiter wants to know more about you as a candidate and why you chose to work as a social media marketer. Tell them your passion and your enthusiasm to work in the industry in the future. Back your answers with a story with regard to what makes you a fitting candidate.

The near best response could be to say that you are aware that the industry is dynamic and challenging which attracts you even more. Show that you don’t prefer a boring job rather you would love to overcome challenges every day.

Q. What is your most successful social media campaign? Why?

Ans: Everyone show (probably brag) their accomplishments in their CV and the chances are high that you have done it too. Then why is the interviewer posing such a question?

Well, they wish to know about your accomplishments in your words. They want to know how you started a particular social media campaign, how you tracked the success, and what profit it made for the company. While you are talking about your previous campaigns, they will judge you on your enthusiasm for the industry and how passionate you are.

Q. Do you know our competitors? What Social Media strategies are adopted by them?

Ans: Be prepared for this question. Don’t forget to do your homework. You should learn about the company you have applied to, know their background, what are their key areas, their competitors and what strategies are adopted by them.

Q. What are the tricks that can drive more traffic to our blogs?

Ans: Few of the ways for driving traffic to your blog are:

• Promotion of content across platforms like Tumblr.com, Pinterest.com, Facebook.com, and more.
• Use Instagram to share the title of your blog post or image. Post images to platforms like Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, Facebook, and Tumblr.
• Giving short presentation of content on SlideShare and providing link to the content or blog from SlideShare.
• Pin your post to Pinterest contributors by using an attractive title of the blog, image, hashtags, and adding keywords.
• Create a few seconds preview of your post like Vine or video which could be posted on Twitter and Instagram with a link to the blog post.

Q. What are top Social Media Marketing Tools to consider?

Ans: Here are some of the best social media tools to leverage:

• Sproutsocial

This tool manages multiple pages, brands, and searches. It assigns the task to team members, post analytics, competitor research, and reporting.

• HootSuite

It is used for search or monitoring, reporting, social media dashboard, and team management.

• Radian 6

Enterprise social media management application for post analytics, research, listening, and campaigns.

• Zendesk

For collecting messages from social into one collaborative inbox, customer engagement platform, e-mail voice etc.

• TweetDeck

Similar to HootSuite, TweetDeck helps to manage multiple social media platforms like LinkedIn, Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

• Crowdbooster

This tool is used to measure user engagement over time across various social media networks. It also gives clue on what kind of content will suit your business the best.

Q. What is the difference between social customer service environment and social marketing environment?

Ans: This question on social media will differentiate between mediocre candidates and above par candidates.

• Social Marketing Environment

It calls for a more conversational approach. Since most social media conversation doesn’t revolve around sales, the best candidate will be able to recognize where someone is in their purchase journey and thereby, will guide them to their destination.

• Social Customer Service Environment

This requires the ability to resolve conflict, patience, and empathy. The candidate must be able to recognize situations that call for an escalation to management. As a social media expert, you should know that you are not responding just one customer but the audience of future customers.

Q. What are the marketing strategies to generate leads?

Ans: They will hire you only if you know how to generate leads!

Here you need to know how social media is giving you an something quantifiable for the investment you are putting in.

Social Media ROI = No. of Leads

 

Q. What is the most important task of a social media manager?

Ans: With this question, the recruiter will judge you on how you prioritize your task list. You can answer by monitoring the audience within the brand’s social channels. The most important task of any social media manager is not to get likes or shares on the posts shared but to engage the followers regularly. It is important to make your fans feel that you are there for them and care for them. Showing them interest to have them as a customer will do the trick!

Q. Have you ever handled online reputation crisis?

Ans: It is one of the most common social media job interview questions faced by a social media manager.

Tell them what ‘Online Reputation Crisis’ means to you (in accordance to their company’s working) and what are the possible steps you would take to resolve the problem.

Suggest them to have ‘best practice’ protocol if they don’t have one. Mention about the social media policy and how will you resolve the conflicting situation.

Q. How can we allocate a budget for social media advertising?

Ans: You should prepare your answer on the basis of how best to allocate your budget and how can you track if it is successful or not.

For instance, let’s take a typical budget for Facebook ads. Depending on the type of company and the market, a minimum of $500 per month is a good start.

Investment in content marketing and social media is mandatory for success. There are 6 ways to consider if you want to see the Return on Investment (ROI):

• Training
• Manpower
• Time
• Financial
• Monitoring, publishing and reporting software
• Attention

 

 

Q What is Social Media Marketing?

Ans: Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. It is the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites.

Q  How do you use social media as a tool for customer service?

Ans: Social media is a great tool for customer service since you can have the conversation with customers directly, using analytics you can see how they’re responding to content, and find influencers to chat with and bring over to your network. Some of these influencers might even be customers. Social media is also a good indicator of overall company vitality and analytics.

Social media marketing connects consumers and audiences to businesses that share the same needs, wants, and values.

Q Can social media marketing really help my business?

Ans: Definitely yes! It’s been proven fact now. In fact, not utilizing social media marketing can actually harm your business, since having an online presence on social media is simply expected of any reputable firm these days.

Q. What are the benefits of social media marketing for any company?

Ans: Social media plays an important role for any company’s success. Whether your business is taking advantage of it or not, social media has forever changed the way that consumers communicate with businesses, and vice versa. Being accessible to your customers – and your prospective clients – via social media is a vital means of developing relationships with them and helping them through the sales funnel.

Q What are the benefits of social networking websites?

Ans: Social networking websites allow individuals, businesses and other organizations to interact with one another and build relationships and communities online. When companies join these social channels, consumers can interact with them directly. That interaction can be more personal to users than traditional methods of marketing and advertising. Social networking sites act as word of mouth or more precisely, e-word of mouth. The Internet’s ability to reach billions of people across the globe has given online word of mouth a powerful voice and far reach.

Q What is the one strategy that will help me succeed in Social Media Marketing?

Ans:  One strategy that will help you and me succeed in social media, it is being more human – being authentic, helpful and creative. You can apply this strategy to every aspect of social media marketing – creating content, listening to your audience, responding and interacting with them.

Q How a company measure social media marketing success?

Ans: There is no one way to measure success in social media marketing, it depends on your goal-

1. If you want to measure awareness, then use metrics like volume, reach, exposure, and amplification. How far is your message spreading?
2. If you want to measure engagement, then look for metrics around retweets, comments, replies, and participants. How many people are participating, how often are they participating and in what forms are they participating?
3. If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, then track URL shares, clicks and conversions. Are people moving from social media to your external sites and what they do when they are on your site?
4. If your goal is to increase your brand’s share of voice, then track your volume relative to your closest competitors. How much of the overall conversation around your industry or product category is about your brand?
5. If your goal is conversion, then track webinar registration, online lead generation form completion, registration for content downloads, online sales. How many people took action because of your message?

Q  Which social media platforms should my business have a presence on?

Ans: There is no fixed answer to this question, because you need to have a presence wherever your customers are – and different businesses have different audiences. One demographic spends most of their time on Facebook, while another really only engages on LinkedIn, and some divide their time equally between three or more sites. Find out where your customers are, and follow them there.

Q How important a blog  is for any company for social media marketing?

Ans: A blog is a non-negotiable parameter for social media marketing. Apart from all of the benefits it provides on its own, such as increasing your credibility as an industry expert, and providing fresh, keyword-rich content on a regular basis to please the search engines, a blog is a vital component of social media marketing. One of the most effective types of content to post on social media is a link to a blog post. Without fresh blog posts being shared on a regular basis, you won’t have nearly as much to talk about with your fans, and you won’t be driving as much traffic to your site, either.

Q:10 How should we be using Facebook for marketing?

Ans: Facebook is the social media platform of choice for over a billion people worldwide. Use it to connect and interact with your audience, and to share your content in a way that encourages your fans to share it as well.

Q How should we be using Twitter for marketing?

Ans: Twitter has over 313 million users, and is ideal for sharing your content and connecting with other influencers in your industry.

Q How should we be using LinkedIn for marketing?

Ans: LinkedIn has over 467 million users. It is a great place to share your credentials with the world, but more importantly, it’s the perfect place to interact with your audience online. Using LinkedIn Groups, you can answer questions and contribute to discussions in order to demonstrate your industry thought leadership as well as your willingness to help others generously.

Q How should we be using YouTube for marketing?

Ans: Videos are becoming more and more important in the world of social media marketing. YouTube gets over 4 billion views per day! Promote your brand’s image through a video, let your audience have a peek behind the scenes at your business, or make a how-to video.

Q How much time should social media marketing take each week?

Ans: Timing is the most important key in social media marketing. Best part is, by using social media you have the opportunity to reach your specific audience in real-time. But even though there are many tools you can use to schedule and automate posts to save some time, you’ll also want to keep track of the activity on your social media accounts throughout the day, so that you can provide timely responses to audience questions and comments. Between strategizing, creating and posting content and images, responding to your audience, and checking analytics, social media done right can be a full-time job.

Q Is outreach an important part of social media marketing?

Ans: Guest blogging is one of the most effective and widely discussed methods of outreach, but social media also can help your outreach efforts significantly. Connect with other influencers in your industry via social media, and then build relationships with them through conversations and helping them to promote their content. Building a relationship in this way before reaching out to ask for a guest blogging opportunity can boost your chances of success greatly – and when your audience sees that you regularly converse with other experts via social media, they’ll see you as an expert, too!

Q  How long does it take before I’ll start seeing results from social media marketing?

Ans: The way social media is evolving constantly, the results depends on variables such as the time and effort you’re putting into social media marketing management, your budget, your audience, your strategy, and whether you’re using paid ads or not. Regardless, it’s important to remember that social media is a marathon and not a race.

Q What are some common social media marketing mistakes that business make?

Ans: One of the biggest mistakes is inconsistency – only posting sporadically, and not responding when consumers reach out to engage. Another one is using social media as a place to announce your own content and nothing more, without ever engaging in discussions or adding comments to the post that make your audience want to click or like or share.

Q What are some general tips for social media success?

Ans: Post consistently. Let your passion and personality shine through. Engage in conversations. Answer questions. Encourage audience engagement. Provide valuable content freely. And be creative.

Q What’s the Best Time to Post?

Ans: The reality is there is no single best time to post. It all depends on the network you’re using and when your audience is most active.

It’s going to take a little trial and error to get your timing down. A good idea is to use Sprout to schedule your content to be shared at different times and days of the week.

Then dig into your analytics to see which posts are getting the most engagement to get an idea of when the best time to post is for your audience, on each specific network.

Q:20 How do I get more followers?

Ans: By giving people a reason to follow you.

Regardless of which network you’re talking about, it’s the quality not quantity of followers that matters. You need followers who will actually engage with your content, not just add to your follower count.

Since people are bombarded with content from all over the place, you have to give them a compelling enough reason to follow you. You’re not just asking people to follow you. You’re asking for their attention which is a limited resource. Always keep in mind why should they give their attention to you instead of someone else?

Q. Does Social Media affect SEO?

Ans : Yes, it does but indirectly.

One common misconception about social media and SEO is that getting your content shared on social media will help improve your rankings. Google has flat out stated it doesn’t count social shares in its algorithm.

However, social media can still help your SEO efforts indirectly. You can use social media to network with influencers like bloggers, editors and journalists. These are all people that can potentially link to your website in their own content, which can help your SEO.

By using social media to build relationships with the right people, you can even land guest blogging or interview opportunities. Just be cautious of spamming people. You don’t want to come right out the gate begging people to link to your content. Instead, build relationships organically by liking, sharing and replying to their content. Build familiarity first, then when the time feels right look for an opportunity to work together.

Q What’s my Social Media ROI?

Answer: ROI is the amount that you earned from your social campaigns, minus the amount you invested.

Keep in mind ROI might look different depending on your goals. If you’re using social media to get leads, your return won’t be the same as it would if you were using it to build brand awareness.

Q How to get your customers involved and engaged?

Ans: Engagement—the sum of reshares, likes, comments, and clicks—is a big signal of social success for many people.

To get more people talking about and interacting with your brand on social media, here are few tips-

Ask questions

Share behind-the-scenes

Run a contest

Host a chat

 Q How to get more retweets on Twitter?

Ans: Here are a few of the most helpful strategies

• Include an image with your tweet.Tweets with images receive 150 percent more retweets than those without.
• Tweeta maximum of 100 characters. This leaves room for others to add their own message when they retweet.
• Tweet at theoptimal time. Check your Twitter stats to see if there’s a certain time of day when you get the most engagement on your tweets. Many people have found this time to be when their most followers are online; you can use Followerwonk to find these times and implement a schedule directly into Buffer. (Late night might be a great time, too!)
• Increase your following. Find relevant users to connect with on Twitter.

Q Top 5 reasons why social media is worth the investment?

Ans: Building brand awareness and customer engagement are really great reasons for brands to join social media! Along with those, here are five more reasons to join social media-

• Social media is a key driver of traffic to your website.
• Social media influences buying behavior.

68% of 18-to-34-year-old social media users surveyed were at least somewhat likely to make a purchase after seeing a friend’s post.

• Customers expect and appreciate support via social media

More than half of Twitter users actively engage with brands via the social networking platform and nearly half prefer Twitter to other forms of communication when they have questions about a company’s products or services.

• People are likely already talking about your brand on social media.
• You can measureROI, however you want.