Setting your expectations, what to ask in an interview and what not to ask

Social media is a blessing and a burden for entrepreneurs. When you get it right, it can drive valuable customer traffic that makes your business successful. The problem is, most small businesses do not have the time, employee resources or know how to make their social media truly great.

Content creation and community management are relentless. When you’re deep in payroll, the last thing on your mind will be filming reels. However you’ll need that consistency, creativity and daily effort to keep your social media strong.

Many small businesses will get the ball rolling with their accounts, but will reach a point that a full-time or contract social media manager becomes necessary. If you are embarking on a social media hiring process, check out the below information to ensure that you get it right.

Set your priorities and expectations

Social media managers are not one size fits all.

I’ve seen business leaders stereotype the role as a new college graduate who spends more time TikTok dancing, talking in emojis and posting what they have for lunch than doing “serious work”. This false persona doesn’t accurately capture the amount of strategic thinking that good social media requires and leads to social media managers being criminally undervalued.

Social media job postings sometimes offer sub-entry level hourly rates, but demand 3-5 years experience. The math simply does not compute.

Social media requires skill and there are a variety of experience levels and specialties within the landscape. Content creation, paid media, community management and influencer marketing are examples of the sub-specialities that social media professionals do.

It’s unlikely you will find someone who is equally fluent across all those areas. However, most small to mid-sized companies must attempt to lump all those topics into one role because of budgetary constraints.

In those cases, prioritize which areas of social media marketing are most important to you, and look for someone who is strong in those skills. 

Plan to offer at least $30-$100 per hour depending on the level of experience and specialized skills you require.

As a final note on expectations, do not expect to get the same results by using AI as a complete replacement to social media experts. At this point, AI often spits out generic and mediocre content. Even with additional brand training in your prompts and massaging the outputs, a lot of human work is still required to make a smart strategy, get the messaging right and display true creativity.

Your social media hire can absolutely use AI to increase productivity but do not expect that it will completely slash their workload.

Helpful interview questions

• What are your areas of expertise within social media?
• How will you shape your plan to effectively reach {brand target audience}?
• Walk me through a past social program you’ve worked on. What was the goal? What did you do? And what KPIs did you track?
• Can you give an example of when you’re pivoted your approach based on mid-campaign learnings?

Unhelpful interview questions

• How many followers do you have?
• Have you ever gone viral? Can you help me go viral?
• My niece has a fashion Instagram account, how can she get more followers? (Unless your niece is hiring the person to work for their fashion business)
• Can we just use AI to write the posts?
• Can you guarantee we’ll get x number of followers?

Conclusion

Set your expectations, know what your priorities are and interview for the skill sets you need. 

If you’d like to talk about social media management or any other digital marketing topics, drop us a line on the Contact Us page.