Top 28 Social Media Manager Interview Questions You Must Prepare 19.Mar.2024

You're looking to see if they have habits in place for checking notifications of brand mentions, content shares, comments and other engagements, across the business's active social platforms.

Make sure you study the business you're interviewing with, think about their target audience, industry they work in and possible strategies they could follow and then compare it to what each social network offers. You'll have no problem to tackle this question and other similar ones if you have done your homework and informed yourself about the business/brand beforehand.

This should highlight the extent of your potential social media managers Google+ knowledge. Google indexes Google+ content faster than content posted anywhere else. It's a platform that has grown rapidly since its launch in 2011 and is now one of the main social platforms. A social media manager should know this and should understand whether your target audience is present there, thus viable for your business, and how Google+ can be leveraged to fulfill your wider marketing objectives.

Talk about why the strategy inspired you but, more importantly, also detail how you would love to create an original strategy of the same caliber. Explain how you would do this and implement it in the context of the job you're interviewing for.

Social media managers that know their trade will be able to explain about EdgeRank to you. EdgeRank is basically what runs Facebook posts. Without knowledge of this, they will have little insights into how to properly optimise Facebook campaigns. EdgeRank determines who sees what, when they see it and how often it's seen. It also provides a good picture into their technical knowledge and understanding of social media.

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.

Social media employers often stress conversation, storytelling, and engagement. Give examples of how you have conversed with clients and consumers, created interesting stories, and increased measures of engagement such as clicks, likes, reach, etc. Any campaign you mention should have these three elements at the very least. Be sure to save dashboards and results from your campaigns so you can show them off later!

A social media manager who has done their research on your business should know your target audience. How this is answered is the key because it provides you with an instant understanding of their perceptions of your business. If a social media manager extends your business visibility to many networks, then your marketing efforts may spread too thin and mean some of the campaigns might suffer. They should pick where your target audience is already situated and focus on maximising performance on those platforms.

Not all social platforms are created equally. A social media manager needs to figure out where their brand's audience actually is and invest there. The ideal candidate's answer should reflect that.

  • Engagement. Whatever the channel, there needs to be measurable conversation around your company brand. Content is what drives social marketing success so if your content stinks, you won't see people engaging. Your candidate should be well-versed in writing and curating relevant content for your audience.
  • Leads. Have they run a social campaign that generated leads? What's their track record with Facebook ads? Organic (non-paid-for) leads from social media look very different than the ones you see from advertising. Listening and responding timely to social media leads is crucial. Just like in real life conversations, when people talk to you, they expect a response.

You can promote your blog or content on the social media site using Co-Schedule.

  • Social Sharing Schedule can double your traffic
  • Use different title for same blog and schedule the blog post
  • Schedule posting differs for different social sites, for example, you cannot promote same post to Facebook twice in one day than is on Twitter
  • It allows you to create social messages at the time of post creation
  • Plan out your blog post promotion with simple strategy with a simple Timeline

The tools that Social Media Manager would consider would be

  • Zendesk: Collecting messages from e-mail voice, customer engagement platform, social into one collaborative inbox
  • HootSuite: Team management, social media dashboard, reporting, and search/monitoring
  • Sproutsocial: Manage multiple brands, pages, searches. Assign tasks to team members, reporting, competitor research and post analytics
  • Radian 6: Enterprise social media management application for campaigns, listening, research and post analytics
  • TweetDeck: Just like HootSuite, TweetDeck helps you to manage multiple social media accounts- such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn
  • Crowdbooster: It measures users engagement overtime and across multiple social media networks. It also suggests what kind of content are best for the business
  • WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin: An editorial calendar plugin will give you a bird's eye view of your entire content publishing plan like publishing schedule, editorial task, blog post key topic, and ideas,

Creating profiles and pages and then posting content to them isn't the job – anyone can do that. The ability to build and engage with the community is the qualifying test of whether someone is a social media manager or a social media user.

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.

Engagement, brand reach, lead generation, and conversions. These are the essential measures of social media's return on investment (ROI). They should also be able to more specific in terms of Google Analytics, metrics from software they use, or metrics from a specific platform. Don't make the mistake of thinking that engagement on its own is success either. Without conversions that can be tracked back to that engagement, efforts have been unsuccessful.

To become a Social Media Manager, you should have a

  • Native understanding of each social media network
  • Ability to connect corporate objectives to messaging, content and campaigns
  • Ability to write concisely
  • Ability to sympathize, engage and effectively communicate with a diverse range of people and opinions
  • Provide customer service and handle complaints
  • Deep understanding of the products or services the company renders
  • To intuitively know how your audience experience the brand, communicate online and how to leverage those opportunities

If you are a social networking enthusiast, you surely follow some blogs and influencers. Let the recruiter know you are always up to date and share your favorites!

You're trying to learn what their process is for publishing and what tools they are familiar with. You'll want them to mention how they tie social media activity to business KPIs.

Any social media manager who values your work opportunity will do initial research before sitting down with you. If they doesn't know what your competitors are doing, it should raise alarm bells. A social media manager should be able to give you insight into the way your competitors are using the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube right from the offset. This can always be researched fully later, but will give you an idea into their proactiveness and organisation.

Make sure to respond promptly. The longer you take, the bigger the blunder looks to the consumer. Make sure any apology you give is honest and sincere. Otherwise, followers were rip it apart even more. Respond on all channels as well even if the incident only occurred on one.

Engagement, brand reach and lead generation is what helps show the ROI of social media to a business, these measurements show the results of your job. Show the interviewer that you are an expert analyzing the metrics and have solutions to improve them.

SEO is a desirable 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.

A social media manager should know that social networks come with limitations; API calls, bandwidth limitations, character limits etc… If a social media manager has never run into limitations and hasn't experienced how to overcome them, then this likely means that they are not very experienced. In fact, they will probably be completely new to the social media landscape. Asking how they overcome any hurdles with their past or current clients will give you a good indication of how they respond to adversity.

A solid answer would be monitoring and/or listening to the audience within the brand's Social channels. Engaging regularly with fans and followers is evidence that you're there – you care – and you're interested in having them as a customer.

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.

Here you will need to drop some names. It's important you know how to use one or more Social Media Management platforms such as HootSuite, SproutSocial or TweetDeck. Be prepared to explain why you use them and what features you like from one or the other.

SEO skills are important to have when you are working with social media. Talk about your SEO strategies, the tools you use and the way you measure and analyze the results.

Google Analytics is a must here. Also, provide examples and be prepared to be tested by the recruiter.

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.