DMN3 Blog

Whether you plan to promote from within, recruit a new employee or outsource the leadership of your social media strategy to another organization, there are some things you should consider when evaluating candidates.

As I discussed in my previous post, do not pick someone to lead your social media strategy for the wrong reasons. You can read my post on this subject here:

You Need a Social Media Strategist: Here’s Why

When evaluating a candidate’s credentials for any position, one typically looks at five things:

• Education/Training
• Experience
• Results
• Interview
• Recommendations
  

I believe that these long honored criteria still hold true with some caveats that I will discuss. They can be used to assess both individuals and marketing agencies. Of course, with agencies you will need to assess their “social media team” as well as the person who would be assigned to lead your efforts.

Promote, Recruit or Outsource? Each organization will need to determine what is best for their particular circumstances. Part of your decision may include the following:

Good social media strategists are hard to find. Finding someone with the right background of business skills and social media understanding is difficult in today’s hiring market. The result is that the recruiting process will take time and money. Unless you are a brand name and have a very competitive compensation package, you could find yourself lowering your qualifications for this position.

Given the shortage of excellent candidates, promoting from within or outsourcing to a marketing agency may be a better short term option. Over the long run it would be better to have the overall leadership for social media in house. It also makes outsourcing many aspects of developing and implementing a social media strategy much easier.

Evaluating a candidate using the five factors above involves more than reading a resume, followed by an interview process. The evaluation process should include such things as Googling their name and reviewing relevant pages found, reviewing their Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, reading their blog and other content they may have published, reviewing social media brand pages and communities they may have managed, etc. It this day and age, they have left an online trail for you to analyze.

Education/Training: I still believe that education is important. An experienced mid-level or higher level management person probably does not have a degree in social media per se. A good candidate might have a degree in marketing with an emphasis in digital marketing. They also might have combined marketing and business management during their studies.

You also want to know what they have done recently to enhance their skills in social media through educational or training efforts. These efforts could take the form of formal education courses or degrees, online courses, workshops and seminars, etc. Do they possess any certifications in social media?

Experience: Experience in social media is relative; given the fact that social media as it exists today hasn’t been around that long. Five years of real social media marketing experience would be great for any candidate.

Couple that with marketing experience and business management experience and you get a better candidate. Remember that social media marketing needs to be integrated with other marketing efforts. Online marketing experience is also very helpful. Other experience factors to consider:

• Management experience
• Agency experience
• Experience in new program development
• Experience in adopting new media

Results: If candidates have the experience you seek, then they should have a track record. Were they successful in their previous use of social media marketing efforts? What about other management and marketing endeavors?   

When evaluating their past efforts, remember that social media marketing has been a learning process for everyone. Failure in this arena should not be a disqualifying factor by itself. What is important is what they may have learned from the failure.

That brings us to the final criteria: The Interview

Interview: You can learn a lot about the person or agency through one or more interviews. You can explore their education, experience and results of their past efforts. For instance, what did they learn from their failures? You can also assess their knowledge and understanding of social media with the right questions.

Remember the level of the position for which you are hiring: Upper level management with responsibility for social media may not be knowledgeable about minute details of social media strategies, but they had better have a strong overview of strengths, weaknesses, analytics, etc associated with social media.

Whoever you hire, they should be able to discuss the role of social media and how it can be used to reach a target audience. While there may not be a “right” or “wrong” answer to many of the questions below, a candidate should be able to intelligently discuss them to your satisfaction.

Personally I always look for a candidate to admit what they don’t know instead of trying to bluff their way through an answer.

You can add or subtract from the following interview questions for your particular social media position.

• Where do you start when it comes to social media?
• How do you find your target audience and then focus your social media efforts on them?
• How can you determine the best social media channels to use for their target market?
• What are the best social media sites and tools out there?
• How do you integrate different social media efforts together and tie them to other online and offline marketing efforts?
• What are the best tactics to use? Are there “best practices” for social media?
• How do you build a social media audience?
• How do you optimize social media for search?
• How do you get the C-suite to “own” social media?
• What are the best metrics to use to track the success of social media? How do you measure ROI?
• Discuss a particularly successful social media campaign you designed?  What sites, tactics, etc did you use and why did you consider it successful? What metrics did you use to determine its success?
• Talk about a social media campaign where you were failing. What did you learn and what did you do to change it?

Recommendations: Recommendations can be a valued resource in the selection process for both individual and agencies. If the candidate had a successful social media track record with another company and that organization confirms it with a high recommendation, then you can have more confidence in your selection. Make sure the recommendation is legitimate as best you can.

If you heed this advice, the chances of you hiring the right social media strategy entity for the right reasons will be vastly improved.