Sometimes it can be hard to keep up with the lingo and jargon surrounding social media. Every other week there seems to be a new social network on the scene, or a new feature on an existing app to get to grips with – it certainly makes it difficult to keep track of the new terms that keep cropping up. That’s where this glossary of social media terms comes in!
As social media aficionados here at The Media Octopus, we’re always learning about social media and wanted to develop a resource not only for ourselves, but for anyone with an interest in understanding the different social terminology.
Use the alphabet below to jump to a certain letter, or browse at your leisure. If there’s any you think we’ve missed, let us know over on Twitter @themediaoctopus!
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
A
AddThis
AddThis is a free website plugin allowing users to add share, follow and recommend buttons for various social media channels. It helps to generate likes, shares and followers, promote the content and encourage traffic back to the website through social media.
API
An API, or Application Programming Interface, is a set of programming instructions, routines, protocols and tools for accessing web-based software. When a software company releases its API to the public, it gives developers the building blocks to design products to work in harmony with the original application software.
Attribution
Attribution is the process of assigning value or credit to a marketing activity based on a desired outcome. There are different models of both single touch and multiple touch attribution which track a user’s journey and find out where they have interacted with a business during their purchase funnel.
Benefits of attribution include allowing businesses to better allocate budget across channels and improve on ROI, while also being able to understand how their digital channels are working together. Attribution can also provide insight into audience behaviours and demographics.
Avatar
An avatar is the icon or image you use for your social media channels. Most businesses use their company logo for their official channels.
B
Blog
Blog is a truncation of ‘weblog’ and is a regularly updated website or page, consisting of entries or posts. Many blogs focus on particular topics relevant to a website’s desired audience. Social media plays a big part in blogging, as social channels are used to promote, share and discuss blog content across the globe.
bitly
bitly is a URL shortening service which also allows users to track the stats on their links. URL shorteners allow for easier sharing of content with others through social media channels without wasting on characters.
Board
On Pinterest, a user can create individual boards based on categories to house different types of pins.
Brand Identity
Brand identity is the way in which a brand, person or business is perceived. Having awareness of what your brand identity is or would like to be will help you to structure guidelines for social media, content and paid search strategies as part of wider marketing activities.
Building on brand identity online is about inviting consumers inside your brand experience and culture by using suitable language and relevant content to build a tone and presence to make your brand feel more authentic, engaging and real.
Buffer
Buffer is a simple and effective tool for sharing content across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. It is designed primarily for social media content management, acting as both a social scheduling platform and a content curation tool. It also offers content ideas online in the ‘Suggestions’ tab, all prepped with links and ready to share if you decide to.
C
Chat
Chat is a private internal instant messaging service available on a various social networks. Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and even Snapchat have chat services which allow users to have private conversations with each other.
Circles
Circles are a fundamental part of Google+, and are essentially a way of grouping people together based on how you think of them. Common Circles include family, friends and work colleagues, but the options are endless for how you wish to organise your contacts into categories.
Grouping people into Circles allows you to share content only with a specific Circle if you wanted, allowing you greater control of who sees what content. For businesses, it allows you to have a more authentic dialogue with key prospects.
Comment
A comment is a written remark or opinion used a way of discussing and engaging with content online.
Social media naturally encourages dialogue between companies and their customers, but those comments can be both positive and negative and businesses should ideally have internal guides on how to deal with and engage with both types of comments.
Communities
Despite the world of social networking in general often being referred to as an online community, the Communities we’re referring to here are actually a part of Google+. You can create your own private community, or search and join public communities on topics you’re passionate about.
Communities allow you to join in with conversations by sharing and discussing content and ideas with like-minded people.
Connections
Connections are made with people you connect with on LinkedIn. Connections are more likely to be made with people you have met or would like to do business with, rather than being friends or family members as LinkedIn is the ‘professional’ social network.
Connections can be valuable for businesses for generating prospective clients and employees.
D
Distribution
Distribution is the process by which you share your content on social media channels. Many businesses have a distribution plan in place which maps out what to share, where to share it and when to share it.
Focusing on sharing key, quality, relevant content on your social channels is one way of dealing with the the rapidly and exponentially growing amount of content published online.
Direct Message
Direct Messages, or DMs, are a way of sending a private message to your contacts on Twitter. They’re limited to 140 characters like tweets and you can only send a DM to a Twitter user who is following you.
E
Ello
The latest social media channel on the market, Ello gets a mention for marketing itself as an ad-free social networking service. It’s in its early stages, and at the moment is invitation-only, so the verdict is out on whether this one’s here to stay.
Engagement
Engagement measures how much and how often others interact with you and your content in social media. Someone is actively engaging with your content when they take the time to like, favorite or comment on something you’ve posted.
On Twitter, engagement comes in the form of Replies or Favorites; on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Vine it’s Likes and Comments; and on Google+ it’s +1’s and Comments. Many social platforms also offer additional engagement metrics.
Measuring engagement helps you to see what posts or content gets the most attention to guide your content strategy.
F
Facebook
Facebook is the place for people to stay connected with family and friends to share updates. With a total of 1.4 billion users worldwide, a third of the UK population log in everyday and 20 million (83%) do so via a smartphone or tablet. Every month it is estimated that 700 billion minutes are spent on the social network sharing 70 billion pieces of content per month.
Facebook is a specific avenue for paid social media advertising and has more extensive targeting than most other forms of paid social available at the minute, predominantly because of its size. You can target by thing such as specific interests, locations, and other key demographics such as age, race and religion if necessary.
Favorite
On Twitter, Favoriting a tweet is less direct and action-driven than a retweet, but signals that the user has appreciated your tweet enough to add to their archive. To Favorite something, you simply click on the star by the tweet you’d like to endorse. Anything someone Favorites is available to view on their Twitter profile under the Favorites tab.
Foursquare
Foursquare is a local search and discovery service mobile app providing a personalised local search experience for its users. It’s great for helping to find places to go for food, nightlife and entertainment in a specific area.
Friends
A ‘friend’ on Facebook means that both individuals are happy to see each other’s posts and content, directly contact each other on the social media channel, access personal information they’ve shared on the platform, plus tag them in comments and statuses.
Follow
On Twitter and Pinterest, subscribing to have someone’s new Tweets or Pins come through to your feed is called following. On Twitter you can follow individual accounts, and on Pinterest you can follow all of someone’s boards or just the ones you’re interested in.
Follower
On Twitter and Pinterest in particular, a follower is another user who has followed one of your social media accounts.
Being followed is a strong signal of online affinity, an indication that the user has an active interest in your brand and want to hear more from you.
G
Google+
With over 343 million active users, Google+ is similar to Facebook with the added value of playing a major role in SEO by making it easier for marketers to show up in search results.
43% of UK users (1.7m) are active via mobile on a monthly basis, with 31% of 25-34 year olds being the most active. The most popular use of Google+ is uploading and sharing photos (68%), with staying in touch with friends coming second (54%) and 42% interacting with brand content. Google is constantly integrating the platform into its products, including Gmail, YouTube and the search engine itself.
Groups
Groups are spaces on Facebook where you can message group members and share updates, photos or documents. Groups can either be Public, whereby anyone can join or be added or invited by a member; Closed, whereby anyone can ask to join or be added or invited by a member; or Secret, whereby anyone can join but only if they’ve been added or invited by a member.
Creating a Public Facebook Group is a great way for a business to create awareness, increase inbound links and cultivate loyalty. This feature is useful for demonstrating a company’s passion for a topic by gathering like-minded people to share ideas. The more people in the group, the more it gets promoted to their friends and networks.
H
Hashtag
A hashtag is a word or phrase without spaces that is preceded by a # (hash sign). They make it easy to track a promotion or competition’s activity across various channels, while they’re also great for engaging relevant people in social conversations.
Successful hashtags are unified across social platforms and aren’t too long or complicated.
Handle
A handle is the name you choose to represent yourself on various social channels. Think of it like a username. It’s used on networks such as Twitter to aid in directing a message your way or mentioning you.
Hangouts
Hangouts are an instant message and video chat function of Google+ which is highly integrated with other Google applications. Hangouts work on computers as well as Apple and Android devices.
If you use Google apps for your business, Hangouts can be a quick way to connect teams and get face time with prospects.
HootSuite
Hootsuite is a social media management system for brand management, taking the form of a dashboard to support social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, FourSquare, MySpace and WordPress.
Hyperlapse
The Hyperlapse app is the latest project from Instagram, designed “to capture high-quality time lapse videos even while in motion.” The tool allows you to film a video and then speed it up between 2x and 12x faster while the app ensures that the video is stabilised.
I
Influence
Influence is the ability to drive action online. When you share something on social media and people respond, that’s influence.
Instagram
A wholly mobile-platform, Instagram is for shared visual experiences and has a hugely active user base of over 150 million across the world. It allows users to edit and upload images and videos using a range of filters and enhancement tools.
You can access Instagram online but only to like and share content that’s already been published through the mobile app.
Interests
Interests are way of keeping up to date with the topics you’re interested in on Facebook. You can add Interest Lists or create your own, and you’ll get a special news feed for each.
J
Jelly
Launched by Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, and former Twitter colleague, Ben Finkel, Jelly was inspired by the concept that if you have a questions, somebody out there that knows the answer. Jelly is a mobile social app which uses your social networks to deliver results. Users submit questions within the app which can be answered by anyone in their existing social networks and forward externally, opening up queries to a broader audience.
K
Klout
Klout is both a web-based and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank users according to their online social influence by giving them a ‘Klout Score’. A Klout Score is a value between 1 and 100 which indicates how influential you are – the more influential you are, the higher your Klout Score.
Klout can be a useful tool for social media managers and marketers for optimising social accounts. Similar to Buffer, it gives users the option to create, schedule and measure content across the connected social media accounts.
L
Like
An individual can ‘like’ a Facebook page or a friend’s post on the social network, signifying their approval or enjoyment of the content without having to leave a comment.
LinkedIn
The social network for professionals to connect with others, join industry-specific groups and search for news within their business sphere, LinkedIn boasts 300 million users worldwide.
With a focus on helping people and businesses to build stronger brands, this channel has a lot of potential in terms of showcasing your business services, employee networks, blog posts, upcoming events and status updates.
Lists
Lists on Twitter can be useful for segmenting users by interest or category. The user is notified when you add them, plus the list is open and searchable to all. A private list can be used for competitors, which is only visible to you.
Lists can also be used on Facebook to organise things you’re interested in or your friends. You can use them to filter things you see in your News Feed, or use them to post things to specific people.
M
Meme
A meme is an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from one person to another within a culture, communicated through writing, speech or rituals with a mimicked theme. Social media is used to spread memes, usually in the form of images, videos, links, hashtags, pictures or specific websites.
Mention
A mention is a way of directing a tweet to a user by including their Twitter handle encourages them to pay attention to what you have posted, usually inviting a response or action.
Metrics
These are measurements established as part of a marketing plan to determine particular goals, which dictate and determine social media activity.
Valuable metrics and key performance indicators for social media can include:
Generating traffic: How many unique visitors from social media channels click through to the company website/blog.
Increase following: Number of people who follow on these channels, subscribe, etc.
Encourage interaction: Quantity and type of commentary on posts e.g. Twitter replies, mentions and RTs, Facebook comments.
Generate revenue: The precise monetary value of every lead that a social post generates.
Myspace
Myspace is a social networking site which allows users to create their own webpage to interact with other users. The ‘new’ Myspace was launched in late 2012 as a music-discovery service and allows users to discover new artists and tracks as well as gives artists the chance to showcase their work.
N
Network
A network as it relates to social is a dedicated website or app which allows users to create a profile, make connections, and share and communicate with each other by posting images, comments, messages or general information.
Networking
Networking online is the process of expanding your individual or your brand or business’ social contacts by making connections on various social channels.
News Feed
You can find your News Feed on Facebook. It’s the list of stories that shows on your homepage that gets constantly updated. Your News Feed includes everything from status updates, photos, videos, links, app activity and likes from people, groups and Pages that you follow on Facebook.
You can organise your News Feed by Top Stories or by Most Recent stories.
O
Ow.ly
Ow.ly is like Bit.ly in that it shortens URLs in order to help you to share files and track visits. Developed by Hootsuite, you can also share files, images and videos easily with Ow.ly in all sorts of different formats.
P
Pages
Facebook Pages are ideal if you’re a business, brand or organisation looking to promote your company or raise brand awareness. Creating one allows you to build a central fan base while sharing promotions and easily making announcements.
Pin
A Pin is an image that someone has posted to their Pinterest account on a specified board. Pins act as online bookmarks to interesting online content. You can save Pins you find on Pinterest to your account, or you can add Pins from external websites you visit to your Pinterest boards.
Pinterest
An online scrapbooking site where users can repin images or share their own on categorised boards. Pinterest has seen a huge growth and significant innovation, with recent data putting the number of users at over 7 million.
With an audience split of 68% female and 32% male and topics like food, weddings and fashion being the top three pinned categories across the network, marketers should keep in mind that Pinterest is currently a female-dominated audience.
Poll
Online polls are used to generate engagement and gain valuable feedback from your audiences on social media channels.
Google+ have released a Poll feature which allows user to embed polls with up to five choices in their Google+ posts.
You used to be able to run polls through the ‘Questions’ feature over on Facebook but unfortunately it was removed, though you can still install Facebook apps on your Facebook page in order to run Polls.
Profile
Your social profile can reveal a lot about you or your business as it’s the place that most people will land or visit when searching for you on social channels. Successful social media profiles should be treated like landing pages for your brand – you want the impression to to be a positive and lasting one that will want consumers to continue to engage with you.
Things like your username, your profile picture or avatar, key links to your website, and your bio are all initial things that need to be carefully considered.
Don’t abandon your social media profiles. Think carefully about which social networks you and your brand have or are planning to sign up to, and ensure you have a strategy in place to keep the profile active and engaging in the long run.
Publish
To publish online is simply to make content available to other users.
Tweets; Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ Posts; Pins; images and videos on Instagram and Vine, are all types of published content.
Pulse
Pulse is LinkedIn’s recently purchased news and insights feature which pulls and displays news from multiple feeds. Previously only an app, Pulse is now fully integrated into LinkedIn.
Q
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R
Reach
The term Reach is preceded by many different descriptors depending on the channel and what kind of reach is specifically being referred to. Reach in a general sense is the potential amount of people who saw your post on a social network based on the total follower account of both you and those who shared, liked or follows your content.
You may see terms such as Organic Reach (the number of unique people who saw your content) on Facebook or Potential Reach (the sum of all of the unique people’s followers) on Twitter.
Real-time
Real-time is the process of using content – be it posts, images, tweets or other social media marketing activity – to engage with your audience that is relevant and timely to current events or cultural happenings. It’s often thought of as instantaneous, quick-response reactions to things via social media, but it can expand out to personalised or adaptive content delivered hours or a few days later across social channels.
Re-pin
The action of Pinning an image that you see in someone else’s Pinterest feed or on their board and adding it to your own is known as Re-Pinning. When you Re-Pin something, you make it available (on your public boards) for others to see if they’re following the board it’s pinned to.
Reply
On Twitter, an @reply is any tweet that is in direct response to another person’s tweet using the Reply button.
Response
A reaction to anything on social media – be it an @reply or a comment – is known as a response.
Brands should ideally have response plans in place for dealing with anything from good press to bad press as response rates (the time it takes for you to respond to something on social media) are becoming a critical component of how consumers judge brands online.
Retweet
A Retweet involves re-sharing someone else’s tweet that you agree with, enjoy or think your followers will also find interesting or relevant.
S
Save
Save is a new Facebook feature which allows you to tap or click and save links, places, content or more to look at later when you have more time. Any items you save will appear under a Saved list which organises the types of things you have saved into categories for easy access.
Selfie
Social media has given rise to the selfie. Selfies are self-portrait photographs that someone takes of themselves, usually with a phone camera or webcam, and shared on social media channels, particularly on Instagram. The word selfie was added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online in August 2013, and it was later named Word of the Year by the same organisation.
Share
A share on social media is the act of redistributing content you’ve found online.
ShareThis
The ShareThis button is social bookmarking tool. The all-in-one widget that can be downloaded to your browser that allows you share content you discover with friends via e-mail, AIM, or text message.
Snapchat
Snapchat is an app for both Android, iPhone and iPads which allows users to take photos or record videos, add text and doodles, and then send them on to a controlled list of recipients. Users can also add the images or videos to their ‘Stories’ which adds Snaps together to create narrative which lasts for 24 hours before disappearing.
Snap
A Snap is the name of the image or video sent using Snapchat.
Stream
A social stream is a single stream of posts and updates from various social networks. You can add your social streams to your blog or website by using a plugin to displays your status updates along with links, images, and videos or other items that you’ve shared. Some social streams can even display the social interactions you’ve had with others.
Streams are also the searches that many social media management platforms use to monitor conversations on Twitter and display them in your dashboard.
Swayy
Swayy is a personalized content discovery platform to help streamline the process of content curation. It helps you discover the most engaging content to share based on what your audience wants to consume by looking at their engagement, interest, and reaction to posts on social channels.
T
Tagging
Tagging is something that you can do on Facebook, Instagram and through some other social channels. It’s essentially adding a tag either to an image or to a post using someone else’s username in order to show them as being in the image or part of the news or activity in a post.
Timeline
Timeline is the format of Facebook profiles which tell your life story in chronological order through posts, photos, friendships and personal milestones. You can jump to various points in time on someone’s timeline using the year marker on their profile page.
Twitter feeds are also often call home timelines.
Timing
Timing is key when it comes to posting on social media channels to ensure your posts and updates have a good chance to be seen by your target audience; there’s no point posting away when users aren’t likely to see it.
Here are the most effective times to post to achieve higher levels of social engagement:
Frequency
Peak time of day
Day of the week
Twitter
5-10 times a day
9am-3pm
Thursday
Facebook
3-5 times a day
1-4pm
Wednesday and Sunday
LinkedIn
2-3 times a day
7am-9am / 5-6pm
Tuesday and Thursday
Google+
3-5 times a day
9-10am
Wednesday
Instagram
Unlimited
Any time of day for optimal effectiveness
Monday and Thursday
Pinterest
5-10 pins a week
9-11am
Saturday
Touchpoint
A touchpoint is the marketing channel that sends traffic to a website with the goal of making or assisting with a conversion. It’s the point of interaction or contact that a brand or business has with it’s customers or consumers. Social networks are one type of touchpoint.
Trending / Trends
Trending topics and events are the most popular things people are talking about, encouraging conversation and interaction, mainly on Twitter and Google+. This offers a chance to get on board what people are talking about, so targeting posts with the popular hashtags helps to get your post noticed.
Twitter
Twitter is a microblogging social media network for real-time news and updates, all messages (tweets) are a maximum of 140 characters for clarity and succinctness. With a total number of over 645 million registered users and 135,000 new people signing up each day, the number of active users stands at 115 million each month, sending an average of 58 million tweets per day across the world.
Tweet
A tweet is a status or post on Twitter of up to 140 characters which can include links, images or video/GIF files.
U
Unfollow
To unfollow someone on Twitter is to unsubscribe from seeing their Tweets in your feed. Typically, users unfollow other users when they no longer wish to see that person’s Tweets in their home timeline.
V
Vine
Vine is a social channel which allows users to create, share and discover six-second long looping video clips. Every month more than 100 million people watch Vines across the web, and there are more than 1 billion loops every day.
Vine is a growing social platform for brands who are using it to create short, stop-motion style videos to promote products and services or provide a sneak peek behind the scenes.
Viral
When something goes viral online, it’s circulated rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another. If something appeals enough to the masses and is shareable then it has the potential to go viral online.
Many types of online content can go viral, despite it the term ‘viral’ usually being associated with videos. The close connections that social media generate means that content manages to go viral online more frequently. Making something go viral is tricky – it’s not something that can easily be done.
Vimeo
Vimeo is an alternative video-sharing site to YouTube, more generally used for high-quality, creative videos from filmmakers and other artists.
W
Who to Follow
Who to Follow is Twitter’s way of helping you to find accounts that may be of interest to you. When you log in to Twitter, you’ll find a regularly updated list of suggested people or accounts based on the accounts you’re already following.
X
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Y
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing that gets 1 billion unique users each month. YouTube is a highly influential digital marketplace where brands and their audiences can engage.
YouTube can be used for owned videos, but also can be used for advertising with more than a million advertisers using Google ad platforms, the majority of which are small businesses.
Z
Zynga
Zynga is a leading developer of the world’s most popular social games. One of it’s most popular Facebook games, Farmville, has reached over $1 billion in total player bookings.
+
+1
A +1 is Google’s version of a Like. By adding +1s to things you like, you show appreciation of the content. When you find something you like and click +1, the Google+ share box lets you send your find to all your friends or just to selected contacts.
Each time you click +1, it’s automatically added to your +1’s in a special tab on your Google profile.
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