Social Media Marketing Interview Questions (and Answers)

Finding top talent in social media marketing is difficult. Not only is the platform ecosystem constantly evolving but the requirements to drive traffic from the channel are growing increasingly technical and quantitative.

When interviewing for social media marketing roles, assess candidates on their:

1. Intellectual curiosity

2. Attention to detail

3. Fundamental understanding of flighting paid media

These qualities are important for social media strategists, social media analysts, as well as social media coordinators.

Question: What was your most effective campaign and what made it effective?

Answer: Being able to identify and articulate the single thing that made a campaign succeed helps build a learning foundation for future campaigns. Great social media marketers transfer learnings across campaigns. Listen closely to see if their answer focuses on creative, targeting, or media.

Question: When creating a paid campaign on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, or Pinterest, which settings do you double-check before going live?

Answer: There may be more than a dozen basic settings and features to adjust before launching a campaign. Is the location set appropriately? Is budget large enough given targeting? Have we added or restricted advertising on certain devices? A great candidate should be able to explain which settings they look at and why.

Question: When do you know when a social media campaign has failed?

Answer: Every social media marketing campaign should have a planned outcome or key performance indicator (KPI). The ideal answer revolves around a business outcome as well as a time frame. When you hire this social media marketer, you'll want to know that they are aligned to business outcomes and don't spend with no end in sight.

Question: What is your experience with landing page testing? What was your biggest win?

Answer: Landing pages have a very significant effect on results. When an ad "holds hands" with its landing page, conversion rate tends to go up. Balancing salacious offers with realistic brand expectations and user profiles is a unique skill that takes time to hone. In ideal cases, your social media marketing interviewee has had significant control over landing pages experience. Their answer here should indicate a grasp of conversion theory and customer journey.

Question: In what ways have you used automation to drive performance results?

Answer: Marketers increasingly leverage automation to scale their work. Community managers should use tools to schedule posts, to batch posts across channels, and to create compelling creative at scale. Paid social managers likely use tools like Smart.ly or Criteo to hyper-target customer segments at scale.

With these five questions any social media interviewer will be armed with the right questions to assess a candidate's ability. Whether the position is for a marketing coordinator, a social media strategist, or marketing director, any professional, experienced marketer should be able to answer these 5 out of 5.