Social Media Strategist Practice

A local grass and seed store is competing against big stores that just moved into the area. They know that customers value their knowledge and experience. How can they use social media ethically to promote this?

• Comment on competitor's posts and redirect to their website.

• Go to community events with a flyer that promotes the store's social media site.

• Post blogs on how to tackle some common planting issues.

• Take pictures inside of the store and post them.

Answer explanation

Businesses often use blogs to develop a reputation as an industry leader, engage with customers, build brand loyalty, and capture referral traffic.

Lisa knows that it is important that some company posts on social media contain links to the company’s website. However, she is unclear on whether it impacts search engine results. Which of the following would explain to Lisa the connection between the two?

• Google considers links from posts to a website as inbound; it can move a company's website

• Google recognizes shareable content as a positive for rankings; however, inbound links are not described as this type of content.

• Google does not recognize any hyperlinks on a website; therefore, the inbound links from social media posts have no effect.

• Google does not recognize inbound links to websites; therefore, the link has no impact on search engine results for the company.

Answer explanation

Social media impacts your search rankings, but not in the way you may think. While Google has not yet stated that social media directly influences its search algorithm, there is evidence to suggest that it does. The Google algorithm does consider the number of inbound links your website has due to social sharing and your social profiles. Social sharing is considered an inbound link, so it can significantly impact your ranking. In general, websites with more inbound links are considered to be more valuable. You might be tempted to think that if you share your website link on as many social media sites as possible, that would be one way to optimize your social media presence.

Company XYZ will be launching a new kayak line in 9 months. The marketing team has created two personas for the marketing plan. Part of the marketing plan will be a social media strategy. Which social media strategy would be most effective?

• Use X for both Persona 1 and Persona 2.

• Use Pinterest for both Persona 1 and Persona 2.

• Use Instagram for both Persona 1 and Persona 2.

• Use Snapchat for Persona 1 and Pinterest for Persona 2.

Answer explanation

X is limited to 280 characters. LinkedIn is geared to working professionals. Instagram is a photo and video-sharing platform. Pinterest is a visual bookmarking service to pin images and videos and is primarily known for DIY. Snapchat posts have a limited length of time before becoming inaccessible.

The marketing team uses the same username and password for all of their social media sites. They have the information posted in the mailroom. What is the threat and weakness in this situation?

• The threat is the visible username and password for each site; the weakness is a hacker posting on the company sites.

• The threat is social media administrators; the weakness is malware that can be posted.

• The threat is customers who comment often on the posts; the weakness is the lack of control over comments.

• The threat is a hacker posting on the company sites; the weakness is the visible username and password for each site.

Answer explanation

A threat is the potential for a person or thing (the threat source) to successfully take advantage of weakness and do harm to a company or individual. A weakness is a flaw or vulnerability that enables the threats to occur.

A local business is reviewing its social media policies. They find that their employee code of conduct policy is old and that they are missing a policy on privacy. What behavior do these two policies address?

• Acceptable use behavior

• Operational behavior

• Ethical behavior

• Professional behavior

Answer explanation

There are several types of policies a company should create to help mitigate the risks they might encounter due to social media. Policies set the guidelines and best practices, clearly stating the consequences if the policy is not followed. A social media policy is usually a combination of a number of policies that together provide social media guidelines for the company and its employees. There are three types of policies your company can create: Operational — Guidelines on how the company uses social media, information technology, and security guidelines, and escalation pathways. Operational policies tend to be very specific for each company and are beyond the scope of this course. Ethical — Guidelines on what is or is not acceptable behavior on social media. Ethics policies might include an employee code of conduct, privacy policy, and disclosure policy. Acceptable use — Guidelines that cover how the company and its employees use social media, what is allowed and not allowed, and any participation rules that must be followed.

Enrique has been asked to define strategies that improve search engine results. The company uses social media campaigns with great results. How can these campaigns be used as a search engine optimization strategy?

• Use only links to YouTube videos instead of other video streaming services and use repeatable posts.

• Ensure social media profiles for the company are completely filled out and include links to the company’s website.

• Remove all hashtags and keywords from social media posts and include only links to videos in the posts.

• Use repeatable posts from successful campaigns and remove all hashtags and links in the posts.

Answer explanation

Here are some tips that can help your SEO ranking while improving your SMO: Create fully completed social media profiles. Your social media profiles can be ranked as company searches, which will help you get more space in search results. A company name search displays social media profiles and a company blog or website. Create original, authentic content that provides value to your audience, so they are willing to share it. Add links to your website from your social media posts that contain high-quality content. Use keywords and hashtags to increase the searchability of your content.

Mary is very concerned that upper management doesn’t support her team’s social media risk management strategy. Why is Mary justified in her concern?

• Annual pay increases for the team may be denied due to their lack of support.

• The lack of support may reflect too much anger towards her team.

• The weakest link in any risk management strategy is people.

• Their lack of support might result in denial of time off requests.

Answer explanation

The plan must be supported by company executives and become part of the company's culture. The weakest link in any risk management strategy is often the human factor. Culture, compliance, and conduct management activities can help to reduce the risk from the human element and create a risk-aware culture for the company. In a risk-aware culture, all employees look for risks and analyze the potential impacts when using social media.

Which metric is often used to determine quality scores?

• Engagement rate

• Cost-per-thousands of impressions

• Click-through rate

• Cost-per-engagement

Answer explanation

The click-through rate helps to determine the success of the ads. They are often used by site publishers to determine quality scores. Ads that are well received and have higher click through rates help to improve the quality score.

A small college wants to improve its overall reputation with future students and their parents. They know they need to use social media but are not sure how to do that. What would be a good strategy to consider?

• Ask the students to take and post pictures of student life activities.

• Request the professors to record a short video of an actual class to post.

• Ask the student leadership to come up with three community service events to promote in a post.

• Request each academic department come up with blog ideas to post monthly.

Answer explanation

Businesses often use blogs to: Develop a reputation as an industry leader, engage with customers, build brand loyalty, and capture referral traffic.

An international company is changing its social media strategies. The changes will impact its branches all around the world. Which strategy will measure the success of the plan?

• High-level

• Social media campaign

• Organizational unit

• Platform

Answer explanation

High-level organizational strategy — A high-level strategy is the overall social media strategy for the business. It defines how the company will use social media both externally and internally. It will also describe how the company will integrate social media into business procedures and practices.