7 Questions to Ask Your Social Media Strategist


Social media is an important part of the buyer’s journey in this day and age. This change has created the need for a new position in the marketing department: the social media strategist. While the position may seem simple and self explanatory, it’s important that they are doing certain things to ensure that they are providing results for the business.

If you’re thinking of hiring a social media strategist or you want to make sure your current one is leveraging social media to the fullest, try asking them a few of the following questions and see if their answers match up to ours.

Question 1: Do they have their own personal social media accounts? If so, what’s their engagement with it?

This question is a good one to ask someone who is applying for or in the role of a social media strategist. It’s pretty simple for anyone to learn how social media websites work, but it takes someone more fluent in the sites to be able to perform the tasks of a strategist in a way that will deliver visible ROI.

Ideally, you want your strategist to answer with an enthusiastic “yes.” Chances are that if they are a frequent user of social media, they will be able to spend more time creating your brand’s voice and converting followers into leads instead of learning how to work the sites they are using.

Question 2: Do they like having a position that has varying tasks or roles depending on the day?

The role of a social media strategist changes from day to day. The ideal person for this job has to enjoy the possibility of wearing many hats and changing them frequently. Oftentimes, social media strategist have other titles which require the same kind of shifting daily responsibilities, such as copywriting or SEO strategizing.

A person in this role must be very good at multitasking and keeping projects organized, even though they may not need to work on them for months at a time. With the various things that a social media strategist can be responsible for, it’s important that you find one who can be a chameleon.

Question 3: Are they reactive or proactive?

This question is especially important for determining if the person in this position is doing their job correctly. As mentioned above, the responsibilities can be many, so they may not have a lot of time to focus on one thing. Because of this it is important that your social media strategist is proactive and plans ahead for any situation.

If your social media strategist is more of a reactive person, this could lead to a lot of problems. For example, say your website goes down for an hour and your strategist notices it, but does not say anything and hopes no one notices. If your customers take to social media to complain about it before your strategist has preemptively said anything about the outage, then you could have a PR nightmare on your hands.

If you want to avoid something like this happening, it is best that your social media strategist is proactive.

Question 4: How do they measure ROI for their work on social media?

The job of a social media strategist may be to spend their days posting on social media, but why? The goal of strategizing social media is so that the business will eventually gain more customers or clients. An important thing for a person in this position to be able to do is measure the ROI of their efforts.

If you ask your strategist this question and they’re unable to provide you with a tangible answer, that should be a red flag. A successful strategist creates a plan that they will then implement with a goal ROI and how to present it if necessary already in mind.

Question 5: Do they care about the actual followers or just the follower count?

There’s no getting around the fact that followers are important when it comes to social media. The more reach that you have, the better chance there is that you will be able to attract new customers to your business.

A good social media strategist will care about the follower count, but their main attention will be with the actual people behind those accounts. Engaging with followers is a big part of bringing in new faces to your business, so it’s important that your strategist care about your followers.

Question 6: What time of the day are they posting on social media?

People have tried, but there is no foolproof way to determine the best posting times for each social media platform. The best times to post will vary depending on your audience. This is something that your social media strategist should be aware of.

Ideally, when asking this question you should hope to receive a response like “it varies,” because it should. They should be playing with different times on different days to see what works the best and pulls the most engagement from your audience.

Question 7: What social media platforms are they utilizing?

A lot of people think that Twitter is the only way to reach potential customers these days. But that’s incorrect. There are plenty of other profitable social media sites out there besides Twitter. Your strategist should at least start by using all of them to see how engaged people are with the platform before writing it off as unnecessary.

Also, the best social media strategists will be up to date on the latest social platforms and ways they could possibly use them for your business. This might include less mainstream social media platforms like Snapchat or Periscope.

When evaluating the successfulness of your social media strategist, the main information you want to leave the conversation knowing is how social media affects your ROI. A successful social media strategist will be able to provide you with answers that show they have a clear strategy and can provide tangible results as well.

If your current strategist is unable to do this, it may be time to start looking for a new one that will make the most out of your marketing dollars.