Hootsuite Social Marketing study guide
Hootsuite Social Marketing · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Hootsuite Social Marketing Certification is the umbrella name candidates commonly use for the free, self-paced training available through Hootsuite Academy. Academy describes itself as offering "Free, self-paced training programs that take you from your first login to confident social pro." Access requires logging in to Academy, and new users are directed to start a free Hootsuite trial to reach it. The Hootsuite Social Marketing study guide has 7 sections and about 2,896 words.
01Getting Started with Social OS
The Getting Started domain tests whether you can build and govern a workspace before anyone publishes a single post. Questions here are structural: how organizations, social accounts, users and permissions fit together, and how the Social OS modules - Perch, Nest, Parliament and Lumen by Talkwalker - sit on one shared foundation.
436 words, about 2 min02Lumen by Talkwalker Foundations
Lumen by Talkwalker is the listening and analytics layer. This domain tests three things: whether you can write a query that returns the right conversation, whether you know what each source actually covers, and whether you can read the resulting metrics without over-claiming.
402 words, about 2 min03AI Foundations and Working with Wisdom
This domain covers the AI layer inside the platform and, more heavily, the judgement around it. Expect questions on where AI assists (drafting in Perch, summarising in Lumen, reply drafting in Nest), how to prompt it, and what a human must always check before anything ships.
409 words, about 2 min04Perch Publishing and Scheduling
Perch is the publishing surface. The exam tests scheduling mechanics - queue versus fixed time, time zone behaviour - plus per-network constraints, approval routing and tracking discipline.
413 words, about 2 min05Nest Inbox and Customer Care
Nest is the unified inbox where comments, direct messages, mentions and reviews from connected channels arrive. The exam tests triage design, routing and assignment, reply standards, and how response metrics are actually defined.
438 words, about 2 min06Parliament Employee Advocacy
Parliament is the employee advocacy module. The exam tests programme design - how content reaches employees, how they share it, how compliance is protected, and how the resulting reach and clicks are measured honestly.
397 words, about 2 min07Social Listening with Lumen and LLM Insights
This domain covers the analysis layer: turning a noisy mention stream into validated insight and then into a decision. Where Lumen Foundations tests query and coverage mechanics, this section tests the pipeline from raw mentions to LLM summary to action - and the checks that stop a summary from becoming a false fact.
401 words, about 2 min