Social Media Certification

Study Guide

Lesson 1: Developing a Social Media Strategy

Lesson description:
Creating a promotional plan that takes advantage of social and digital technologies will help you shape the
conversation, build loyalty, and attract new customers and partners. Social media shouldn’t replace other
Inbound promotional methods like email, events or public relations, but instead, should augment them, offering
another set of marketing channels for you to explore.

Videos:
• Why You Need a Social Media Promotion Strategy
• The Social Media Channels – An Overview
• Building the Foundation for Success - Setting Social Media Goals
• Structuring Your Social Media Team for Now & the Future
• Evaluating the Best Social Tools for the Job
• Developing a budget and garnering executive buy-in

Topics:
• The reasons why a social strategy matters to your business
• Social network overview --what each channel does, what they are best used for
• Buyer’s Journey in social
• Social goals/KPIs
• Business goals tied to social media
• How to build your social team
• How to determine which social tools are right for you
• How to develop a budget and garner executive buy-in

Quiz Yourself:
• What are the benefits of having a social media strategy?
• Why does a buyer persona matter in social media?
• What are the steps you need to build a social media strategy?
• What are some reasons that a marketer would want to use one social platform over another?
• What is a vanity metric?
• What are the four categories of KPIs and how do they differ?
• What considerations do you need to make when planning how to structure your social media team?
• What are the different types of social media team models?
• What components should your social media team plan contain?
• What are the various kinds of social media tools available to marketers?
• What are the three tips that can help you narrow down your choice of a social media tool?
• What marketing tools can you use to delight customers into promoters?
• What considerations do you need to make when building a budget?
• What should you do it if you are arguing for money to start a social media project?
 Social Media Certification
Study Guide

Lesson 2: Social Media Listening and Monitoring

Lesson description:
Social media is so much more than a way to amplify your message—it’s a powerful listening device that your
whole company can learn from. It’s important to understand the difference between social listening and social
monitoring, how to build these simple processes into your routine, how to use social monitoring for competitive
intelligence, and how to choose social media technology to fit your business needs.

Videos:
• Social Media Listening and Monitoring
• The Power of Social Listening
• Understanding Brand Conversation
• Watching the Competition

Topics:
• Social Media Listening
• Social Media Monitoring
• Customer Advocacy
• Inbound Recruiting
• Competitive Intelligence
• Brand Sentiment

Quiz Yourself:
• What’s the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
• How can social media listening increase customer advocacy?
• How do you know which social networks to start with?
• Why should you be careful about monitoring competitors?
• How can competitive intelligence inform your sales and product teams?
 Social Media Certification
Study Guide

Lesson 3: Building a Content Strategy

Lesson description:
Social media is nothing without the content that makes it interesting for its users. Having great content can
make all the difference when it comes to having the best reach and engagement for your brand, which in turn
builds loyalty and drives sales. It’s important to understand the basic types of social media content, how to
develop a strategic plan and about key factors that will help the content you create to have the best results.

Videos:
• Content - the backbone of your social strategy
• Social Media Content: The Basics
• Developing your strategic content plan
• How Tone & Voice Make all the Difference
• Developing Social Media Content
• Demonstrating Industry Leadership Through Content Curation
• The Importance of Tagging, Timing and Testing Your Content

Topics:
• Developing a social-specific content strategy
• Understanding the various types of social content
• Creating a social content plan
• Tone and voice
• Content curation
• Timing, testing and tagging your content

Quiz Yourself:
1. What are the three main reasons people use social media?
2. What are the three types of social media content?
3. What different types of content can be created on each channel?
4. How do your social media goals and buyer persona figure into your content strategy?
5. What’s the difference between tone and voice? Why do they matter?
6. What is content curation?
7. What are some reasons that content curation matters to your strategy?
8. Can you explain the importance of testing, tagging and timing for content?
 Social Media Certification
Study Guide

Lesson 4: Extending Your Social Reach

Lesson description:
For brands that really want to amp up their overall reach, it’s important to find ways to get messages into the
hands of others—both influencers and the users themselves to proliferate. Social media practitioners need to
understand how to take advantage of influencer marketing and how to encourage more people to generate
content that highlights your brand, products and services in a positive way.

Videos:
• Taking Your Social Strategy to the Next Level
• The Varying Shades of Influencer Marketing
• How to Work with Influencers
• What is UGC and Why Does it Matter?
• Encouraging User Generated Content Among Your Audience

Topics:
• Why user generated content and influencers are important to your social strategy
• The different types of influencers
• How to work with influencers
• What is UGC (user generated content)
• How to encourage the development of UGC among your audience

Quiz Yourself:
1. How can influencer marketing and UGC make a difference to your social strategy?
2. What is one of the most important things to keep in mind when working with an influencer?
3. What are the different kinds of influencers?
4. What kinds of influencer campaigns are there?
5. What are some ways you can get started working with influencers?
6. What is UGC? Why is it important?
7. What is earned media?
8. How can UGC help your brand?
9. What are some ways to get users to create UGC?
 Social Media Certification
Study Guide

Lesson 5: Using Social Media to Build One-to-One Relationships

Lesson Description:
Long gone is the time that marketers could push a message out to a social channel and be able to trust that their
audience would see it. Now, with so many users and so many other messages, plus network algorithms that
don’t favor brands, it’s more difficult than ever to use social media as a traditional push channel. It means that
it’s time to shift focus and start looking at social media at what it’s best used for--building one to one,
meaningful relationships. Individuals who engage with you on social are likely to trust you more, have deeper
loyalty and will be more likely to recommend your products and services to others.

Videos:
• Why Social Engagement is the Heart of Your Social Strategy
• 1:1 Engagement: Getting Started
• What is Social Customer Service and Should I Be Doing It?
• How to Hit Business Goals Through Social Selling

Topics:
• The benefits of one to one engagement
• Engaging directly with your audience
• What is social customer service
• The benefits of engaging in social care
• Service Level Agreements
• Community guidelines
• What is social selling
• How to engage in social selling the inbound way

Quiz Yourself:
1. What are the benefits of engaging directly with your social audience?
2. What are the benefits of doing social customer service?
3. What are some of the benefits of social selling?
4. What is an SLA?
5. What are some things you can do to foster more general social engagement?
6. What are some things you can do to get started doing social customer care?
7. Why is a buyer persona important to social selling?
8. When should you pitch your product to a person in social media?
 Social Media Certification
Study Guide

Lesson 6: Introduction to Social Media Advertising

Lesson Description:
There are a lot of options out there when it comes to social media advertising. In this lesson, you’ll learn about
the advertising options that are available across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn,
Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. Plus, you’ll learn best practices for creating remarkable
digital ads for social media and see examples of effective social media ads in action.

Videos:
• The Advantages of Social Media Advertising
• Exploring the Social Media Advertising Platforms
• How to Create Remarkable Digital Ads for Social Media

Topics:
• Why social media is a popular and effective advertising channel
• The importance of social media advertising
• Setting goals and selecting ad types
• Exploring the audiences and ad types across social media platforms, including:
o Facebook and Messenger
o Instagram
o LinkedIn
o Twitter
o Pinterest
o YouTube
o Snapchat
o TikTok
• Creating high-performing ads
• Diagnosing your ad’s performance

Quiz yourself:
1. How does social media advertising compare to your organic social media strategy?
2. What are the advantages of advertising on social media?
3. What types of audiences will you find on each social media platform?
4. What business goals can different ad types help you achieve?
5. What are the three metrics that Facebook uses to measure ad performance?
6. What are the best practices for creating remarkable social media ads?
 Social Media Certification
Study Guide

Lesson 7: Measuring Your Social Return On Investment

Lesson Description:
What is social media return on investment, or ROI? Simply put, it’s the results you get from everything you do in
social media, ranging from protecting your reputation, building brand awareness and loyalty, retaining and
satisfying customers, and directly earning or saving revenue. While social ROI is not easy to measure, you can
and should be putting systems in place to regularly track your return on investment. This lesson covers all of the
ways to do so.

Videos:
• Why Measuring Social Media ROI Matters
• The Social Media Audit: The Key to Understanding Your Success with Social Media
• How Do You Measure Social ROI?
• How to Tie Metrics Back and Transform Your Business

Topics:
• Conducting a social media audit
• Analyzing the competition
• Social media key performance indicators
• Calculating the ROI of a social media action
• How social metrics affect various parts of the business

Quiz yourself:
1. Why do you want to measure social ROI?
2. How can a social media audit help your business?
3. What metrics should you track in an audit?
4. What are some leading indicators of revenue success?
5. What are some KPIs you should consider tracking?
6. What social media expenses should you track?
7. How do you calculate social ROI?
8. What are some things that social media and metrics can affect?
 Social Media Certification
Study Guide

Lesson 8: Social Media Essentials for Continued Success

Lesson Description:
Social media is an evolving field, and understanding the challenges, risks, and opportunities for continued
success is critical for social media professionals. Learn about the importance of understanding the governance
and risks associated with social media through proactive word of mouth programs like employee advocacy and
social media plans. In addition, social media activities are not only positive events, but may offer new challenges
with significant and negative consequences to a business. Having a crisis plan that is adaptive and proactive is
critical for social media success.

Videos:
• Why Social Media Doesn’t Stop Here
• Understanding Social Media Governance and Risk
• Putting a Crisis Management Plan in Place
• Building an Employee Advocacy Program

Topics

• Overview of social media for continued success

Quiz yourself
1. What are the four areas to know when exploring continued success in social media?
2. What are some main guidelines and questions employees need to ask about social media?
3. What is the difference between bashtags and hashtags?
4. What is a social media policy?
5. What are the benefits of having a social media policy?
6. What are some of the issues employees may be faced on social media?
7. What are the ethical and legal implications that are included in a social media policy?
8. What are the main components that need to be in a social media policy?
9. Define what a crisis is and how this compares with a social media crisis.
10. What are the types of social media crises?
11. What are the different crisis stages and what actions need to happen in each of these stages?
12. What are must have components for an effective crisis communication plan?
 Social Media Certification
Study Guide

13. What are the takeaways from the Southwest Airlines and Uber case studies?
14. What are some proactive steps to take if a crisis hits on social media?
15. What is employee advocacy?
16. Why is an employee advocacy program important?
17. What are the steps to take to start an employee advocacy program?
18. What are some ways to incentivize employees to participate in employee advocacy programs?