Finding Your Perfect Content Manager Match
At the end of the day, you need a content manager who fits your needs and your business.
The above activity can easily be adapted to any company, industry, or team, but here are three things to consider as you customize it to your needs:
Subject matter interviews are often far from neat, so throwing in these evaluatory challenges will help you see how your potential candidate rolls with the punches.
Use these tips, the steps, and the qualities we outlined and youll be well on your way to finding the perfect content manager for your team.
Want some more insight? Check out our free IMPACT+ How to Hire a Content Manager, or if youre looking for more hands-on guidance, talk to an advisor on our team. Were happy to help.
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During an interview for a Social Media Manager or Social Media Specialist position, your potential employer will be looking to gain an understanding of your previous social media work, as well as your social media skills and knowledge. They will also be assessing whether you would fit in with their company culture.
Here are a few tips to help you prepare for a Social Media Manager or Social Media Specialist interview.
To help you get ready for any social media interview, we have compiled a list of frequently asked interview questions for Social Media Managers and Social Media Specialists.
How Do You Successfully Manage Multiple Social Media Accounts At Once
Many businesses benefit from having multiple social media accounts. Employers ask this question to see if you have the skills to create engaging content on different platforms. Prepare for this question by thinking about what strategies you use to create unique content for each platform.
Example:”For my previous role, I managed Instagram and Facebook accounts for a brand. A best practice is to create different content for each platform to keep users interested. My strategy is to plan posts for each platform a month in advance. Each of these platforms should use the company’s voice but have slightly different content. For example, Instagram should be more photo-based while Facebook can showcase things like the company culture of the brand. When creating my strategy, I think of what each platform’s audience expects from that platform.”
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Pitch My Company To Me As If I Were A Potential Customer
This will show you how much they know about your company and what their level of passion is for your product, service or industry. It will also tell you what their initial impressions are without the insight of working for you . It’s unlikely they’ll be prepared for this, so it can also show you how quickly they work on the fly.
Which Companys Social Media Accounts Do You Admire And Why
From a personal and business mindset, this is a great way to gather information about your candidate and what they find interesting. They may have a more professional take on business social media, but like a little chaos and silliness in their personal lives.
Example answer
There are an endless number of answers to give here but itâs always a treat to rummage through the mind of the person youâre interviewing to see what they think is successful. Is it the number of followers or how much engagement a company gets? The number of famous people that follow? The content itself?
Along the way, someone will inevitably answer with Wendyâs Twitter. Just be ready. Anyone in the industry knows they have a huge following because “Wendy” doesnât take nothinâ from nobody on Twitter. Sheâs the roastmaster of fresh-never-frozen Tweets. The comeback queen. Itâs become a thing and people are crazy about it. Sheâs a gal who says what she thinks and having built a massive audience in the process even has other blue checked companies begging for her to roast them.
Note from the author: Can you tell my favorite account to follow
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When To Say No To Work Assignments
Most of the time, its totally legit for companies to assign a project as a way of observing your skills. But what do you do if youre not sure if the request is fair or legitimate?
They wont answer your questions
If youre not sure that your intellectual property is safe, ask the interviewer what they plan to do with your completed assignment. This is a completely reasonable question that they should be glad to answer. If you find that they dont have an answer for you or they are unwilling to walk you through their process, you can estimate that they have dubious intentions.
You arent allowed to modify the assignment
If the workload assigned seems overboard, ask if you can just do a portion of the assignment. Your employer should understand that you have responsibilities and obligations apart from the job that you must respect.
If they push back and insist that you complete the entire assignment, inform them how much time you will devote to doing the work and ask them to judge the work keeping that information in mind.
Tell Us About A Situation Where You Failed To Communicate Appropriately In Hindsight What Would You Have Done Differently
This question seeks to get to the heart of a learning experience born out of failure. Weve all had them, but the best of us will use those difficult situations to build our professional skill sets and learn how to do things better in the future. Probe for evidence that the applicant has evaluated the event critically and objectively to use it as an opportunity for professional growth.
Routine of every social media manager!
Mediastra Digital
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Which Do You Feel Is More Important For Social Media Marketing Engagement Or Impressions
The second of our social media manager questions is to determine what the candidate thinks is the more important metric. This isnât so much a trick question because either answer could be right but there is an answer thats the better of the two. Itâs still a good look into their mindset.
Example answer
Both are, of course, important to social media metrics, but of the two, impressions are a number you want to be really high. Engagement is great because people are interacting with your content, but impressions can be subconscious and still effective. As an example, outside of social media, when you drive home from work and see a billboard, there isnât some big “like” button to click. But you saw it and now the product is in the back of your mind. Later on, you might grab that brand of beer or call up that pizza place instead of another. All because you had an impression of that ad, even though you didnât engage. The same idea works when translated into the digital world.
What Strategies Would You Use To Generate Leads
A lead is typically an email ID or a phone number that a prospect enters into a form in return for information. This is treated as an expression of interest in the companys offerings. Brands use a wide range of strategies to generate leads:
- Content in the form of lead magnets
- Social media contests
Social media is no longer a silo that works on its own. It plays a significant role in improving search engine rankings for brand content. A good social media manager needs to understand what kind of content is rewarded, what is punished, what adds value to the audience etc. It also helps to have a good understanding of Google Analytics and website performance metrics.
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What Skills Are Key To Being An Effective Social Media Manager
Answer this question by detailing a combination of social media and behavioral skills. Look at several job descriptions for the social media manager positions so that you can understand the skills hiring managers are looking for. Some of the most commonly sought skills are:
- Familiarity with social media platforms
- Ability to create/repurpose content for various platforms
- Project management skills for content planning and scheduling
- Collaboration skills to work with copywriting, design, video, and analytics teams to execute successful campaigns
- Problem-solving skills to handle criticism and win over followers
- Community management skills to interact meaningfully with followers and customers
- Crisis management skills to effectively manage negative campaigns or inadvertent mistakes
Additional Personal Social Media Interview Questions
- What is the most important job responsibility for a Social Media Manager or Social Media Specialist?
- Give us some reasons why should we hire you over someone else.
- Please tell us about your preferred working style.
- Why do you want to work with us?
- Please tell us three of your strengths and three weaknesses.
- What brands give you social media inspiration?
- What is your favorite thing about working in social media?
- Where do you find creative inspiration?
- Do you follow any social media experts or influencers?
- Whats your approach to handle a customer crisis on social media?
- We would like our employees to be more excited about engaging with and sharing our brand on social media. What should we do?
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Write A Thoughtful Job Description
The first step in any hiring process is writing a strong job description. While this is necessary for promoting the job, its also an exercise in defining exactly what you want out of this role.
Take the time to really dig deep into your business needs, asking questions like:
- How much experience do I want this person to have? A mistake I see many business owners make is outsourcing social media to an intern or junior hire to save money. This can work if youre prepared to provide training and support, but if you aren’t, then you should aim to hire someone with more experience.
- What resources will I be able to provide?Expecting a social media manager to run social strategy and create videos and visual elements and write copy and do customer support and run ads and report on analyticsas you can tell, its a lot. Think about what your key needs are and what resources you have to help cover some of the other bases.
- What channels do I want them to focus on?I always recommend brands focus on their social media marketing on one or two channels, rather than trying to be great at them all. Given how many specialties there are in social media marketing, you should also look for candidates with specific experience in those channels. Its also important to consider whether you want someone with more experience on paid or organic since those are such different skill sets.
Describe One Strategy That Will Help You Succeed As A Social Media Marketer
Authenticity is key. No matter the type of company youre interviewing with, whether their audience is businesses or consumers, its 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.
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Mention Some Tools That Social Media Manager Wants To Consider
- 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 birds eye view of your entire content publishing plan like publishing schedule, editorial task, blog post key topic, and ideas.
What Steps Do You Take To Block Spam And Bot Accounts
Spam and bot accounts are a burden for brands, as they increase costs, waste time, and clog timelines. They also cause lower engagement and rankings, and affect conversion rates too. A good social media manager should be able to identify spam/bot accounts and eliminate them effectively.
Explain how you would conduct a social media audit to identify spam/bot accounts. List the tools youd use. Discuss your strategy to report or block these accounts. Consider how feasible it is to manually block these accounts and plan accordingly. Also, outline how you plan to prevent bots from following you in the future.
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Encourage Employee Advocacy On Social Media
A company’s employees are its most important asset. This is because they are a trusted, unbiased source of information, which you can use to leverage your social recruiting strategy.
Content that is shared by employees receives eight times more engagement than content shared by brand channels, so encouraging your employees to share job post openings on their personal social media accounts, as well as endorse their work achievements is a great idea to raise brand awareness.
Social Media Assistant Interview Questions
Social media assistants work in the marketing department to plan and execute social media campaigns. The social media assistant also uses analytics to see how successful campaigns are.
When interviewing social media assistants, the ideal candidate should have experience using social media platforms for business. Be wary of candidates who are unwilling to learn about new industry innovations and software.
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Get Clear What You Expect From A Social Media Manager
Theres something you have to clarify before you hire someone to do social media manager work. You have to define how your business sees social media.
Are you approaching this like a direct marketer, who wants to track everything and know their ROI for each platform? Or are you approaching this more like a brand marketer, who simply wants a presence on specific social media accounts?
If you are willing to take a brand marketers approach, can your business financially support doing social media purely as a brand-building exercise? And if you would be happy simply with a larger presence on social media, will your finance department be happy with that? If finance is not happy with that, what could the consequences be?
How Do You Handle A Social Media Campaign That Didnt Perform As Expected
There is no formula for success when it comes to social media. So, handling failures and learning from them is part of a social media managers role. While answering this question, explain how you will evaluate success or failure, conduct your retrospectives, identify causes, document learnings and apply them to future campaigns. If you can give an example from your experience, it would strengthen your answer.
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General Interview Questions For Social Media Managers
The idea is to hire a social media manager who not only has the necessary technical skills required to get the job done but also has the interpersonal skills to keep the entire social team intact and running smoothly.
Thats why interviewers typically divide their questions into two parts:
- Cultural assessment questions
- Skill and background assessment questions
So, before we jump on to the job-specific interview questions, lets go through the cultural assessment questions you can ask a social media manager.
Experts have favored these questions to understand candidates thought processes, work ethics, values, motivations, and self-awareness.
Organization And Time Management Questions
Lets face it: being a social media manager is way more than crafting witty captions or creating the perfect images. It also requires a healthy dose of project management to stay on top of various contributors, influencers, platforms and accounts. The following questions get to the heart of interviewees penchant for organization.
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When Do Work Assignments Come Up During The Hiring Process
Work assignments are typically assigned after the first interview. After youve submitted this assignment for review, they will invite you to a second interview if the assignment was done well.
In some cases, you will be asked to present your assignment at the second interview or at least speak to it in some way.
When applying for a PR role at a tech company, they asked me to write a short press release based on a past service they launched and pick one journalist I would pitch the story to. This assignment was sent along with my resume, and when I was called for an interview, it felt like they were signaling that they liked my work, which gave me confidence.
But employers have never made it clear what they plan to do with my work. If youre going to assign these tasks, there need to be some clearly stated guidelines. Such as: how many hours they expect you to put in and how they will dispose of the work after the hiring process has ended. Otherwise, I am always paranoid they are going to use the work that I did and was never compensated for. Social Media Specialist based in Toronto
You may have noticed in some job descriptions, companies will ask you to submit some work along with your resume right up front. This is common for social media positions, and the assignment is usually social media mock-ups that demonstrate the kind of work you would do for the company if hired.
