Creating a social media presence for your business is a requirement these days, especially if you want to reach new customers and continue to grow your products and services.
But anyone working with social media or digital marketing knows the struggle is real when trying to learn the endless number of buzzwords, keywords, and terms, PLUS whatever the hell they all mean.
But don’t worry – I have done the hard work for you and compiled this list of over 150 social media terms and definitions you NEED to know. Bookmark the page or download the FREE PDF to have it handy whenever you need it!
Enjoy!
A/B Testing: A/B testing, also known as split testing, measures two almost identical social media posts against each other to see which one performs the best. The most common way of performing A/B tests is by changing only one element between the two versions, such as a headline, image, call to action, etc., so that you know any difference in performance is because of that single change you made.
Ads Manager: Ads Manager is Facebook’s tool for creating, running, and analyzing social ads. It can manage your ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, or Audience Network, and offers a wide variety of features for ad targeting, budgeting, and optimization as well.
Algorithm: An algorithm is a defined set of rules used to solve a problem or specify how content is ranked and categorized. In social media terminology, people often use ‘algorithm’ as a shorthand for ‘feed algorithm’, which is the set of rules a social network uses to automatically decide which posts come first in your feed.
AMA: AMA is an acronym for “ask me anything,” used by marketers to prompt questions from other users.
Analytics: Analytics is the way you interpret and find patterns in data. In a social media context, it is the process of following metrics on your social media performance and using that data to improve your strategy. For instance, watching your engagement rate over time to see if your posts are becoming more or less compelling to your followers is one way of using social analytics.
Application Programming Interface (API): An API is a set of building blocks that programmers can use to develop computer programs. All of the major social networks have their own APIs, allowing programmers to create their own software that works with the networks. Third-party social intelligence solutions rely on social media APIs to integrate with platforms like Facebook.
Audience: Your audience on social media is the group of people you’re able to reach with your content. This includes all your followers, plus anyone who sees or interacts with your posts in their feed. Growing your social media audience is one of the best ways to spread brand awareness.
Avatar: An avatar is an image or username that represents a person online, most often within forums and social networks.
Average Response Time: Average response time is a social customer service metric. It is the average time it takes a brand to reply to questions or complaints on social media. Consumer expectations of social customer support response times have become more and more demanding in recent years, with 39% of customers now expecting a response within 60 minutes.
Bitmoji: A Bitmoji is a customized avatar that is a cartoon representation of yourself, that can be added to most social media networks.
Block: When you block someone on social media, you prevent them from seeing your posts on that social network.
Blog: Originally a contraction of the phrase “web log,” a blog is a type of digital publication in which one or more authors regularly post content, generally on a specific topic. Many brands use a blog as a way to share engaging content with their audience and establish their industry expertise.
Brand Advocate: A brand advocate on social media is a customer who posts positive messages, leaves positive reviews, or supports your brand on social. Brand advocates may also encourage other users to use your products or services through word-of-mouth marketing.
Brand Awareness: Brand awareness is the level of familiarity consumers have with your brand. It’s often considered one of the main goals of social media marketing.
Boosted Post: A boosted post is a Facebook post that you put money behind to increase its reach. Boosted posts differ from Facebook ads in the way that they start out as organic posts and then get additional paid reach based on your spend. Also, you can launch them directly from your Facebook Page without using Ads Manager. Like Facebook ads, though, boosted posts allow you to target a specific audience and set an exact boost duration and budget.
Business to Business (B2B): A B2B business sells products or services to other businesses. A good example of this would be consulting firms or business software companies. On social media, B2B brands frequently attempt to position themselves as thought leaders in their industries and provide professional advice to their business peers.
Business to Consumer (B2C): A B2C business deals directly with consumers, like a hotel, restaurant, or retail store. In social media marketing, B2C companies often focus on creating a community around their brand and providing excellent social customer care.
Buyer Persona: Have you ever created a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer? That’s a buyer persona. Used frequently in marketing, a buyer persona represents who you’re trying to sell your products or services to. Buyer personas help you understand the needs of your prospective customers so you can better tailor your campaigns.
Call-to-Action (CTA): A word, phrase, or visual cue that encourages users to take a particular action on a piece of content (i.e. “click here” or “learn more”).
Caption: A caption is a description or message that accompanies a photo on social media.
Chatbot: A chatbot is an artificial intelligence program that can automate customer interactions for a company. Chatbots can be implemented on a number of social messaging apps, from Facebook Messenger to Slack. They can provide customer service, answer questions, and even set up appointments automatically.
Check-in: A check-in is a way of location-tagging a social media post to indicate where the user is, or where the content in the post was created. It’s a way of showing followers that you have physically visited a geographical location or event.
Clickbait: Clickbait is content that uses manipulative copy, exaggeration and withholding information to convince users to click on it. For example, an article with the headline “How to Achieve Unbelievable Results by Doing this One Crazy Trick…” but then only says you should work out regularly. This is considered clickbait because it compels people to click to learn more but then lacks actual applicable content. Social networks like Facebook consider clickbait spammy and will lower the reach accordingly.
Click-Through Rate: On social media, the click-through rate represents the percentage of people that click on the call-to-action link in your post. It should not be confused with other engagement actions like comments or shares. What counts as a click and what counts as ‘seeing your post’ vary by social network. On Facebook, CTR is equal to (link clicks/post impressions) x 100%.
Collaboration: Collaboration is the action of working with someone to produce content.
Comment: A comment is a form of engagement in which a user replies to your social media post.
Community Manager: A community manager is a social media professional who develops brand-focused social relationships by monitoring and engaging with fans and followers.
Connections: The LinkedIn equivalent of a Facebook ‘friend’ is a ‘connection.’ Because LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals, the people you are connecting with are not necessarily people you are friends with, but rather professional contacts that you’ve met, done business with, or know through another connection. Connections are categorized by: 1st degree, 2nd degree, and 3rd degree.
Content: Whatever you create and post on social media is social media content. It can be text, visuals, videos, or a combination. Content is the most crucial element of social media marketing, and the type of content you post and how your audience interacts with it is very important. Let’s go into the specifics of these content formats to understand how they add value to your social media marketing efforts:
Content Creator: A content creator is someone that creates entertaining or educational content for social media or any other medium. Content creation especially pertains to digital content, such as videos, blog articles, digital templates, podcasts, etc.
Content Curation: Content curation is the process of collecting relevant content from credible, copyright-safe sources and then sharing it with your social followers by linking to the original post. It’s a way to create value for your audience beyond sharing your own original content.
Content Marketing: Content marketing is the practice of attracting and retaining customers through the creation and distribution of original, valuable content such as videos, blogs, guides, podcasts, ebooks, infographics etc. Its purpose is to develop a “know, like and trust” factor with potential customers, turning them into paying clients. See Mailchimp’s article on Content Marketing to learn more!
Conversion Rate: In social media terminology, the conversion rate is the percentage of users who see your post, and who then take a specified action. That action is called a conversion, and it could mean purchasing an item, signing up for a newsletter, downloading an ebook, or a variety of other acts. If your social media marketing goal is to increase conversions, your CVR is an important metric for analyzing how effective your content is.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC): Cost-per-click is a social media advertising metric that tells you how much you’re paying for each click on your ad on average. If your social media marketing goal is to drive traffic to a landing page or a piece of content, a low CPC means you’re getting more traffic at a lower price, while a high CPC means you’re paying a lot for traffic. CPC can vary based on many factors, including whom you’re targeting with your ad, what locations you’re targeting, and how relevant your ad is to your target audience.
Cost-Per-Mille (CPM): Cost per mille is another social advertising metric, referring to how much you pay per 1,000 impressions (‘mille’ means 1,000 in Latin).
Crisis Management: Social media crisis management is how you handle events or interactions that could potentially damage your company’s reputation. Inappropriate posts by someone at your company or a social media boycott against your brand may qualify as social media crisis, while a couple of angry comments from customers would not. Crisis management requires social media managers to respond quickly and follow a plan in order to de-escalate the problem at hand.
Cross-channel: In social media marketing, each network (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is also a marketing “channel”. Something that is cross-channel, is content that is posted across all your different social networks. For example, a cross-channel social strategy is a strategy that aligns your objectives across all the social networks your brand is present on.
Crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing on social media means using a large group of people to generate ideas, services, or content via a social network. It lets followers feel involved and engaged with your brand’s activity while generating ideas or content for your brand. Examples could be inviting your followers to vote on names for your new product or asking them to send in title ideas for your new YouTube video.
Dark Post: A dark post is a social media ad that doesn’t appear on the advertiser’s timeline. Unlike organic posts or boosted posts, dark posts only show up in the feeds of users they’re targeting. “Dark post” is an informal term – on Facebook, they’re officially called “unpublished page posts”, on Twitter they’re called “promoted-only tweets”, on LinkedIn they’re called “direct sponsored content”, and on Instagram, all ads are dark posts by default.
Dark Social: Dark social is often confused with dark posts, but the two social media terms actually have nothing in common. Dark social is web traffic coming from social media that analytics tools struggle to track. This is often due to users sharing links privately on social, in chats, or in direct messages. One study found that 69% of all sharing activity takes place via Dark Social globally versus 23% via Facebook
Direct Message (DM): A direct message on social media is a private message sent directly to a user’s or company’s inbox.
Disappearing Content: Disappearing content refers to posts on social media that delete themselves automatically after a set amount of time has passed. Instagram and Snapchat Stories are notable examples, as these sets of photos and videos disappear after 24 hours. In social media marketing, disappearing content is used to be spontaneous and timely, while motivating users to engage through fear of missing out (FOMO).
Ebook: An ebook is an electronic version of a book, typically in PDF form, which is not actually available in print (unless you print them). For marketers, ebooks commonly serve as lead-generating content—people must fill out a form with their name and email to receive their ebook.
Emoji: Emojis are a set of small graphics—such as smiley faces, hand gestures, and other communicational graphics—that are used in digital channels like text messages and social media to help enforce emotions.
Employee Advocacy: Employee advocacy is when co-workers at your company support and promote your brand on social media. This may include sharing branded content, amplifying your company’s brand message, or frequently liking and commenting on company posts through their own personal social media channels. One study found that branded messages obtained 561% more reach when shared by employees than when posted through branded channels.
Endorsement: An endorsement is a form of social proof on LinkedIn that refers to an instance in which another LinkedIn user recognizes you for one of the skills you have listed on your profile.
Engagement: Engagement refers to how people interact with your social media content. For example, if you posted a video on your Facebook page and people reacted, commented, or shared it, that’s the engagement on the post.
Engagement Rate: Engagement rate is a social media metric that tells you what percentage of your audience engages with your content. It’s defined as (number of people who engaged with your post/number of people who saw your post) x 100%.
Evergreen Content: In content marketing, evergreen content is content that ages well and maintains its value over time. Evergreen content is ideal for recycling and repurposing on social media since it does not lose relevance based on the date it’s posted.
Facebook: Facebook is a social media platform that connects people with friends, family, acquaintances, and businesses from all over the world. It enables them to post, share, and engage with a variety of content such as photos and status updates.
Facebook Business Manager: Facebook Business Manager is software that helps organizations manage their Facebook pages, ad accounts, and team members. It serves as a hub to connect a business’s marketing efforts and allows for easy administration. It also ensures that company data and account access are legally under the control of the company instead of an individual user.
Fan: A fan is someone who likes your Facebook Page. “Fan” is sometimes used more generally to refer to someone who follows you on any social channel, but only Facebook officially uses this term.
Feed: A feed on social media is a generic term for the stream of content you see from other users. On most social networks, the feed functions as a homepage and is the most common way to see people’s posts and engage with them.
Filter: A filter is a photo effect that can be applied to images before publishing them. For instance a black-and-white or sepia effect, or facial hair and devil horns.
Flickr: Flickr is a social network for online picture sharing. The service allows users to store photos online and then share them with others through profiles, groups, sets, and other methods.
Follower: A follower is a user on social media who has subscribed to see your posts in their feed. Both personal and business accounts can have followers. Your follower count is a key metric for seeing how your audience on social media is growing or shrinking over time.
FOMO: FOMO is an acronym that stands for “fear of missing out.“ On social media, FOMO is the feeling users get when seeing posts about events or opportunities they want to be a part of. Social media marketers often use FOMO to their advantage by making exclusive or limited-time offers that users need to jump on quickly to avoid missing.
Forums: Also known as a message board, a forum is an online discussion site. It originated as the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board.
Frequency: Frequency is a Facebook and Instagram advertising term that refers to how many times your ad was shown to the average user in your target audience. It’s calculated by dividing total ad impressions by total ad reach. A frequency number above 1.00 means at least some users saw your ad multiple times. This may be positive if your goal is to raise brand awareness and ad recall, but if your frequency is very high, you may be wasting your budget and advertising too many times to each user.
Friends: Friends is the term used on Facebook to represent the connections you make and the people you follow. These are individuals you consider to be friendly enough with you to see your Facebook profile and engage with you.
Geo-targeting: In social media marketing, geotargeting is the technique of adjusting your ad content based on the location of a user. Users can be included or excluded from a target audience based on their region, country, state, city, postal code, or address.
Geotag: A geotag is the directional coordinates that can be attached to a piece of content online. For example, Instagram users often use geotagging to highlight the location in which their photo was taken.
GIF: GIF is an acronym for “Graphics Interchange Format,” a file format that supports both static and animated images.
Google Ads (Google Adwords): Google Ads are a form of online advertising, previously known as Google Adwords. Google Ads appear at the top of the Google search listings for your target keywords.
Groups: Facebook and LinkedIn offer a “Groups” feature where people in similar industries or with similar passions can join a group and discuss topics related to it.
Handle: Your handle is your username on social media and is usually noted as “@username.” It can also be used in your personalized URL for each social network.
Header Image: Your header image, or cover photo, is the visual graphic you place at the top of your social media profile. Often in landscape format, header images are much larger than your profile picture or avatar and can be used to introduce you or your brand to your profile visitors. They can complement your profile picture, show off your personality, or show off a product or service you offer.
Hashtags: A hashtag (#) is a way of connecting your posts on social media to other posts on the same subject or trending topic. By searching for a specific hashtag, users can find all public posts that use it. For example, users seeking content about the Superbowl might look for posts with #Superbowl or #NFL. Social media marketers often follow the popularity of hashtags over time to see what’s trending on social media.
IGTV: IGTV or Instagram TV is where verified businesses and accounts can host long-form videos or place longer live streams after they’ve aired.
Impressions: Impressions are a social media metric that measures how many times your post has been shown in users’ feeds.
Inbound Marketing: Inbound marketing is a strategy that involves creating valuable content and resources that attract potential clients to your business. It is called “inbound” because the resources you create help people to discover and learn about your company themselves, rather than reaching out to them with a sales pitch. Learn more about inbound marketing at HubSpot: What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbox: An inbox is a screen on which you read, organize, and respond to messages.
Influencer: An influencer is a social media user with a significantly sized audience who can drive awareness about a trend, topic, business, or product.
Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing is a strategy involving collaboration with an influential person on social media (an “influencer”) to promote your business, products, services, or campaign efforts. Learn more about Influencer Marketing by visiting Sprout Social – “What is influencer marketing: How to develop your strategy.”
Insights: Many social media networks, like Facebook or Instagram, offer insights pages to their business account holders. These pages often allow the user’s to see valuable analytics about their page and how they’re performing compared to similar pages.
Instagram: Instagram is a photo-sharing application that lets users take photos, apply filters to their images, and share the photos instantly on the Instagram network and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The app is targeted toward mobile social sharing and has gained more than 2 billion users.
Instant Messaging: Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time, direct text-based communication between two or more people. More advanced instant messaging software clients also allow enhanced modes of communication, such as live voice or video calling.
Instagram Live: Instagram Live is the platform where individuals and businesses on Instagram can share a live feed of what’s going on in their business or their lives.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI): A key performance indicator, or KPI, is a metric you use to measure the degree of performance over time, create an analytical basis for decision-making, and can track efficiency, effectiveness, quality, compliance, behaviours, project performance, personnel performance and resource utilization.
Listicle: A listicle is a list-based article. This type of content is often popular on social media because of its quick, easy-to-digest format.
Like: A Like is a form of engagement on social media. It’s a quick way of showing that you—literally—like the content posted by simply clicking a button. A Like is an action that can be made by a Facebook or Instagram user. Instead of writing a comment or sharing a post, a user can click the Like button as a quick way to show approval.
Link Building: Link building is an aspect of search engine optimization in which website owners develop strategies to earn links to their site from other websites with the hopes of improving their search engine ranking. Blogging has emerged as a popular method of link building.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site that is mainly used for professional networking. It has over 830 million members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.
LinkedIn Publishing: LinkedIn’s publishing platform functions as a place where members can publish long-form posts that relate to their professional interests and expertise.
LinkedIn SlideShare: LinkedIn SlideShare is an online social network for sharing presentations and documents. Users can favourite and embed presentations as well as share them on other social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Listed: The act of being “listed” on Twitter refers to when a user curates a custom list of Twitter users to more easily keep tabs on their tweets.
Live Streaming: Live streaming is the act of delivering content over the internet in real-time.
Lurker: A lurker online is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, social network, or another interactive system, but rarely or never participates in the discussion.
Mashup: A content mashup contains multiple types of media drawn from pre-existing sources to create a new work. Digital mashups allow individuals or businesses to create new pieces of content by combining multiple online content sources.
Meme: Memes are funny pieces of text, videos, or images that go viral and let users get in on the joke by creating their own variations and sharing them.
Mention: A mention is an act of tagging a user in a social media message.
Metric: A social media metric is a statistic that measures the performance of your posts, ads, or overall account. Social media managers use metrics to see which content or strategies are working and which aren’t. Metrics may include impressions, reach, followers, engagement rate, link clicks, and more. See Sprout Socials “The most important social media metrics to track” to learn more.
Monetization: Monetization refers to the process of making money online by monetizing a business, an app, or an idea to generate revenue. Creators often talk about “monetizing” their social media presence.
Native Advertising: Native advertising on social media is the method of showing paid content to users in a way that looks organic. Promoted or boosted Facebook posts and promoted tweets are good examples of native ads, as they appear similar to standard posts in users’ feeds while having their reach extended with an ad budget.
Newsjacking: Newsjacking is the technique of hopping on current events with your social media content. Social media managers often engage in newsjacking to seem timely and relevant while gaining exposure by tying their content to key hashtags and conversations around the latest news.
Notification: A notification is a message or alert indicating a new social media activity.
Objectives: In social advertising, objectives are the results you want to achieve through your ad campaign.
Organic: Organic social media refers to the FREE content (posts, photos, videos, memes, Stories, etc.) that all users, including businesses and brands, share with each other on their feeds.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Pay-per-click is a social media marketing term for an ad model where you pay each time a user clicks on your ad. This is typically associated with a traffic objective, as it makes the most sense for advertisers to pay based on clicks when their primary goal is to increase visits to a website or landing page.
Periscope: Periscope is a social video app that allows users to broadcast live video from wherever they are. App users also have the ability to engage with others’ videos, browse live or recent broadcasts, and follow users to receive notifications.
Permalink: A permalink is an address or URL of a specific post within a blog or website that remains indefinitely unchanged.
Pinterest: Pinterest is a photo-sharing social network that provides users with a platform for uploading, saving, and categorizing “pins” through collections called “boards.” Boards are typically organized by theme, such as Food and Drink, Interior Design, DIY projects, etc. Users have the ability to “pin” and “re-pin” content that they like to their respective boards.
Podcast: A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually audio, that are released episodically and often downloaded through an RSS feed.
Pinned Post: A pinned post is a social media post saved to the top of your page or profile on Facebook or Twitter.
Platform: The term social media platform is often used to mean the same thing as “social media network” or “social media channel”.
Post: A post refers to any social media status update, photo, video, or item shared on a blog or forum.
Promote: Promote is a term used in different contexts by various social networks, but it always indicates some form of payment to gain access to a wider audience than couldn’t be achieved through organic content.
Reach: Reach refers to the total number of people who have been exposed to a social post or ad. This metric does not necessarily indicate that all of these people have actually seen your content. If a user sees your post multiple times, they still only count as one person reached. Reach is an important metric for understanding how large the audience for your content is and measuring your progress toward spreading brand awareness.
Reaction: Reactions are a form of engagement on Facebook. In addition to Likes, reactions include Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry. Each of these reactions is indicated by an emoji.
Real-Time Search: Real-time search is the method of indexing content being published online into search engine results with virtually no delay.
Real-Time Marketing: Real-time marketing is a strategy that requires marketers to publish timely content as news breaks. See HubSpot’s What is Real-Time Marketing? (In 300 Words or Less).
Reply: Reply is a social media function that allows you to respond publicly to another user’s comment, creating a comment thread.
Repost: To repost is to share another user’s content on social media. This can include repinning, retweeting, or sharing another user’s Instagram post in your Instagram Stories.
Retargeting: In social media advertising, retargeting is the technique of targeting ads at users who have interacted with your page or website before. A social media marketer may retarget a user who clicked a Facebook ad for new boots, went to the checkout page, and then didn’t complete the sale, for example. Retargeting can be done by either tracking user activities with the Facebook Pixel or uploading a list of past or potential customers to target.
Retweet: A retweet is when someone on Twitter sees your message and decides to re-share it with his or her followers. A retweet button allows them to quickly resend the message with attribution to the original sharer’s name.
RSS Feed: RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blogs and videos in a standardized format. Content publishers can syndicate a feed, which allows users to subscribe to the content and read it when they please from a location other than the website.
Scheduling: Scheduling involves planning social media updates and content ahead of time using a social media management platform or another publishing tool.
Search engine optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a landing page from search engines like Google, Bing, etc. SEO targets unpaid (organic) traffic rather than direct or paid traffic. See Sprout Socials “SEO and social media: How to use search to boost your social marketing.”
Selfie: A selfie is a self-portrait photograph, usually taken with the front camera on a smartphone and shared on social media sites.
Shares: The number of shares is perhaps the most-valued social media metric. A share is counted when your content is shared by others.
Shareable Content: Shareable content on social media is content that’s likely to get users to share it with their networks. Many factors affect what makes content shareable, including how useful, entertaining, and inspiring it is. Content that evokes strong emotions and reactions is also more likely to be shared.
Skype: Skype is a free program that allows for text, audio, and video chats between users. Additionally, users can purchase plans to place phone calls through their Skype accounts.
Snapchat: Snapchat is a social media app that allows users to send and receive time-sensitive photos and videos known as “snaps,” which are hidden from the recipients once the time limit expires (images and videos still remain on the Snapchat server). Users can add text, drawings, and filters to their snaps and control the list of recipients to which they send them.
Snapchat Discover: Discover is a section of Snapchat’s app dedicated to large brands, influencers, and longer-form story content.
Social Customer Service: Social customer service (or social customer care) is customer service via social media. This may include answering customer inquiries, handling complaints, and offering support.
Social Listening: Social Listening is a tactic used by social media managers to understand conversations happening on social media around key topics, terms, brands, and more, often with the use of a specialized software tool. Social listening software works by gathering mentions, comments, hashtags, and relevant posts to provide valuable insights into what people are saying about your brand and your competitors. Check out Hootsuite’s “What is Social Listening, Why it Matters, and 10 Tools to Make it Easier.”
Social Media Management: Social media management involves managing social media accounts, engaging audiences, and measuring the business results of social media activities.
Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing is the use of social media to increase brand awareness, identify key audiences, generate leads, and build meaningful relationships with customers.
Social Media Monitoring: Social media monitoring is often confused with social listening, but there are some important differences between the two. Social listening involves actively setting up projects to seek out conversations on specific topics and gathering data on them. Social media monitoring, on the other hand, is the more passive technique of keeping an eye on your mentions and following what your audience is saying. See Sprout Social’s “Why brands need a social media monitoring strategy” to learn more!
Social Media Metrics: Marketers use these parameters to measure the performance of social media campaigns. Standard metrics include shares, likes, comments, CTA clicks, traffic, etc.
Social Media ROI: Social media ROI, or return on investment, is a measurement of how much revenue your activities on social media are generating for your company versus how much you are spending on them. Because many brands’ social media objectives are more about generating brand awareness than leads or sales, social media ROI is notoriously difficult to estimate.
Social Proof: An indicator of your capabilities and track record; your receipts. Social Proof can take the form of case studies, testimonials, customer reviews, etc.
Social Selling: Social selling, put simply, is using social media to make sales. Often, this takes place when salespeople interact with potential customers on social, establishing a relationship they can leverage for a future sale. This could be done by answering questions, sharing company content, or mentioning their brand in a post comment.
Sponsored Posts: Sponsored posts are social media posts in which an influencer or celebrity highlights a brand or product that they have been paid to promote. These posts must be identified as ads using a hashtag like #ad or #sponsored.
Story: A Snapchat, Facebook, or Instagram story is a string of videos or images that only lasts for 24 hours. Users can create stories to be shared publicly or just a customized group of recipients. See also “Disappearing Content”.
Tag: A tag is a keyword added to a social media post that serves to categorize the content. You can also tag other people in a post or photo, which creates a link to their social media profile and associates them with the content.
Targeting: Targeting is a social media advertising term that refers to how you select the potential audience for your ads. Most social advertising platforms allow you to select which users should see your ads based on age, location, gender, interests, and a variety of other factors. Targeting options are one of the most important aspects of creating effective ads on social media.
Thread: A thread is a string of messages that make up a conversation, such as in a forum or message board.
TikTok: TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms of all time, The app, beloved by Gen Z, is similar to Vine in that it highlights bite-sized looping videos that can also have musical overlays.
Traffic: Traffic is the number of users who visit a given website or page. In a social media context, increasing traffic is a common marketing objective for businesses who want to drive their audience to a blog, landing page, place of sale, or other URL outside of their social network.
Trending Topic: A trending topic is a subject or event that has a sudden surge in popularity on social media. Several social networks track the top hashtags or subjects people are posting about and include a “trending topics section”. On Twitter, this section is currently called “Trends for you” and is personalized and localized, while Instagram has an “Explore” section which lets users see relevant content that is trending in their area.
Troll: A troll is a social media user who makes deliberately offensive or annoying postings with the sole aim of provoking other users.
Twitter: Twitter is a real-time social network that allows users to share 140-character updates with their following. Users can favourite and retweet the posts of other users, as well as engage in conversations using @ mentions, replies, and hashtags for categorizing their content.
Unfollow: To unfollow someone is to unsubscribe from their social media account.
Uniform Resource Locator (URL): URL is the address of a website page or other resource on the Internet (i.e. https://yourwebsite.com).
User-Generated Content (UGC): User-generated content, or UGC, is fan-created content promoting a brand. UGC can come in the form of videos, images, posts, audio, reviews, articles, and more.
Vanity Metric: A vanity metric on social media is a statistic that may look like a positive indicator of performance but doesn’t actually provide you with valuable insights. Impressions are a classic example, as they are often larger than reach, but only tell you how many times people scrolled past a post in their feed without revealing the bigger picture of how popular or engaging the post was.
Verified: To be verified on social media means that you have proven your identity to the social media platform provider and gained a verified label in return, usually in the form of a checkmark.
Viral: Viral is a term describing content that spreads exponentially on social media. This typically occurs because an increasing number of people share the content with their followers, then their followers share the same content with their followers and so on, creating a ripple effect.
Vlogging: Vlogging or a vlog is a piece of content that employs video to tell a story or report on information. Vlogs are common on video-sharing networks like YouTube.
Webinar: Webinar is a combination of the words “web” and “seminar.” A webinar is a digital broadcast of a presentation intended to educate or inform
WhatsApp: WhatsApp is a messaging, phone, and social media app that allows people to connect internationally over a Wi-Fi network.
Forbes.com: The Key To Increasing Your Brand’s Reach By 561%? Your Employees.
Hubspot.com: What Are Your Customers’ Expectations for Social Media Response Time?
RadiumOne: The Light and Dark of Social Sharing
CNBC.com: Instagram surpasses 2 billion monthly users while powering through a year of turmoil
HubSpot: Social Media Definitions: The Ultimate Glossary of Terms You Should Know
Brandwatch: The 65 Social Media Terms and Definitions to Know in 2021
Hootsuite: Dictionary of Social Media Terms
YCS Marketing: Social Media Terms & Definitions You Need to Know in 2021
HubSpot: What Is Inbound Marketing?
Sprout Social: What is influencer marketing: How to develop your strategy
Hootsuite: What is Social Listening, Why it Matters, and 10 Tools to Make it Easier
Sprout Social: SEO and social media: How to use search to boost your social marketing
Sprout Social: The most important social media metrics to track
Sprout Social: Why brands need a social media monitoring strategy
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