HubSpot Social Media Marketing Certification cheat sheet

The inbound social workflow is: set a goal tied to a business outcome, define a target persona, choose platforms where that persona is active, publish, measure, then iterate; skipping the goal step makes platform choice arbitrary.

Platform-audience fit: LinkedIn skews B2B professional and longer-form thought leadership; Instagram skews visual and younger consumer; Facebook has the broadest age range and strong paid reach; X (Twitter) suits real-time conversation and news; TikTok suits short-form discovery video; YouTube suits searchable long-form video.

Content pillar model: 3-5 recurring themes (for example educational, product, community, culture) each with an assigned post frequency; pillars prevent ad hoc posting and let you compare performance by theme rather than by individual post.

Content calendar fields that matter: publish date/time, platform, pillar, format (image, video, carousel, text), caption, CTA, owner, and the tracked URL with UTM parameters so downstream analytics attribute traffic correctly.

UTM structure: utm_source = platform, utm_medium = social (or paid_social), utm_campaign = campaign name, utm_content = post or creative variant; consistent casing avoids separate rows in reporting.

Engagement rate formula: (likes + comments + shares + saves) / reach (or / followers) x 100; state which denominator you use, because reach-based and follower-based rates are not comparable.

Posting cadence is platform- and resource-dependent, not fixed: the defensible rule is to publish at a frequency you can sustain with quality, then test increases against engagement rate and follower growth rather than assuming more is better.

Social listening means monitoring brand mentions, keywords, hashtags, and competitor terms without direct tagging; it feeds product feedback, competitive positioning, and crisis detection, and differs from engagement, which is responding to interactions on your own posts.

Organic reach is the number of unique users who see a post without paid distribution; paid reach is reach bought through ad delivery; total reach is not the sum of the two because the same user can be counted once per channel.

Social ROI formula: (revenue attributed to social - social spend) / social spend x 100; social spend includes ad spend, tooling, and labor, and attribution must be defined (last-click, first-touch, or platform-reported) before the number is quoted.

A/B test rule: change one variable per test (creative, headline, audience, or placement), hold budget and schedule constant, and run until the platform's reported statistical confidence threshold is met; stopping early inflates false positives.

Paid targeting hierarchy: campaign objective (awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, conversions) sets the bidding and optimization event; ad set holds audience, budget, schedule, and placement; the ad holds creative, copy, and destination URL.

Retargeting sequence logic: exclude users who already converted, segment by funnel stage (video viewers, page visitors, cart abandoners), and cap frequency to avoid fatigue; unsegmented retargeting wastes budget on converted users.

Community management response rule: respond to questions and complaints within the brand's stated service window, route product or billing issues to a private channel, and never delete criticism unless it violates published community guidelines.

Influencer selection criteria that predict performance: audience overlap with your target persona, engagement rate relative to follower count, content quality fit, and disclosure compliance; raw follower count alone is a weak predictor.

Reporting cadence and metric hierarchy: monthly reports lead with business-outcome metrics (leads, revenue, cost per lead), then channel metrics (reach, engagement rate, click-through rate), then diagnostics (frequency, video completion, response time).