Social Media Glossary of Terms:
Brainy Social Media Jargon Buster

Introduction:

What You Need To Know About Social Media Jargon, Terms & Meanings

Over the last couple of decades, social media has literally taken the world by storm, and an entire marketing industry has sprung up around it. No wonder, then, that there’s so much jargon attached. But don’t worry; a good number of the terms in this glossary will be familiar to you already. Others will need a little more mental gymnastics to get your head around, but hey, that’s what we’re here for, right! Come along for the Brainy ride and soon you’ll be speaking and writing like a true SMM pro.

Grab yourself a coffee, stick with it and take the time to fully conceptualise those terms that are a little more nuanced. That’s how to put yourself on the fast track to social media wizardry. Once you’ve learned all the social media jargon, go back and test yourself to check your knowledge. Let’s do this!

A

all social media jargon starting with A

Term: A/B Testing
What it means: Comparing the performance of two social media posts against each other based on one elemental change between them, usually a slightly tweaked image or text.
How to use it in a sentence: “I’ve A/B tested our Father’s Day posts, and it looks like the ‘I am your father’ Darth Vader angle is getting more traction.”

Term: Ad Recall Lift
What it means: An approximation of how many users will remember your brand after seeing one of your ads.
How to use it in a sentence: “I love our creatives, but we’re struggling with low ad recall lift.”
Other terms it relates to: Analytics, Brand awareness, Feed, Impressions, Qualified lead

Term: Ads Manager
What it means: Facebook’s very own toolkit for overseeing your social media ads. It allows you to create, run and monitor ads on Facebook, Instagram or Audience Network.
How to use it in a sentence: “Did you see the latest Ads Manager report? This quarter’s engagement is skyrocketing!”
Other terms it relates to: Insights

Term: Algorithm
What it means: Not specific only to social media, an algorithm is a computerised and pre-defined set of rules to solve a problem. Within social media there are feed algorithms, which ‘decide’ which posts to give priority and show you first as you scroll through your feed.
How to use it in a sentence: “My feed algorithm’s really messing with me. I’ve seen the same green tea cafe promo 3 times today.”
Other terms it relates to: Feed, Evergreen content

Term: AMA
What it means: ‘Ask me anything’. Since it’s inception in a subreddit, this handy acronym has risen in popularity as a super speedy way of prompting other users to ask questions.
How to use it in a sentence: “Hi, I’m Yoda, 900 years old, Jedi council member and master of the force. AMA.”
Other terms it relates to: Troll

Term: Analytics
What it means: Data to help you keep tabs on your social media performance.
How to use it in a sentence: “Could I get a social analytics report for this month please?”
Other terms it relates to: Ad recall lift, KPI, Reach, Sentiment analysis

Term: API
What it means: ‘Application Programming Interface’. Essentially, digital building blocks that allow developers to construct programs. Most of the major social platforms have their own API, to engineer software that operates within the network.
How to use it in a sentence: “Facebook could improve the user experience by rethinking the API”

Term: Avatar
What it means: A personalised digital rendering of yourself that represents your identity in online spaces. Alternatively, an Asiatic-inspired anime about people with powers of elemental telekensis. You decide.
How to use it in a sentence: “Check out my avatar, he’s got the new YEEZYs!”
Other terms it relates to: Bitmoji, Bio, Header image

Term: Average Response Time
What it means: What is says on the tin! The average time it takes a brand to respond to an enquiry, complaint or question on social.
How to use it in a sentence: “Their average response time is incredible – do you think they’re using bots?”
Other terms it relates to: KPI, Engagement Rate

B

all social media jargon starting with B

Term: Bitmoji
What it means: Imagine an avatar crossed with an emoji. A bitmoji is a personalised emoji, created by the user and often sharing their resemblance.
How to use it in a sentence: “Oh my god, that bitmoji is wild!”
Other terms it relates to: Avatar, Emoji

Term: Bio
What it means: A short description or blurb, used on social media as an opportunity for the user to describe themselves and what they’re all about. Bios also present an opportunity to share key links or other accounts high on your social page.
How to use it in a sentence: “We’re going to be dropping a mixtape very soon – see our bio for the link.”
Other terms it relates to: Avatar, Handle, Header image

Term: Boosted Post
What it means: Also known as a ‘promoted post’. If a brand or influencer wants to put some extra promotion power behind a post, they can back it with money to give it increased visibility.
How to use it in a sentence: “That post on World Oceans Day should go big, let’s boost it the day before.”
Other terms it relates to: Feed, Impressions, Native advertising, Paid social media, Reach

Term: Brand Advocate
What it means: An individual who effectively vouches for a brand or company on social by sharing positive vibes about it.
How to use it in a sentence: “Since that first purchase, he’s gone on to become one of our most valuable brand advocates.”
Other terms it relates to: Brand awareness, Employee advocacy, Follower, Organic Social Media

Term: Brand Awareness
What it means: Basically, how many people know about your brand, and how familiar they feel with it.
How to use it in a sentence: “A key objective this quarter is to boost our brand awareness.”
Other terms it relates to: Ad recall lift, Brand advocate, Native advertising, Traffic

C

all social media jargon starting with C

Term: Chatbot
What it means: A piece of software that uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to automatically respond to users and interact with them, within a ‘chat’ program or feature.
How to use it in a sentence: “Chatbots utilise some smart technology, but users are often turned-off by unpersonalised interactions.”

Term: Clickbait
What it means: Heavily sensationalised content that is designed to play on user’s curiosity in order to attract clicks. Invariably seen as negative in a marketing context.
How to use it in a sentence: “Hey look at this article – ‘Jurassic Park is the worst movie of the 90s. Here’s 8 reasons why’” – “Keep scrolling, that’s just clickbait.”
Other terms it relates to: Newsjacking

Term: Collective Intelligence
What it means: A kind of digital hive mentality; shared knowledge, garnered through resource-sharing and collaboration, that features as part of consensus decision-making and can indicate a status quo.
How to use it in a sentence: “Based on collective intelligence, it looks like Charizard is the most popular Pokemon from the original 151.”
Other terms it relates to: Insights, Sentiment analysis, Social listening, Social proof

Term: CPC
What it means: Cost per Click. A metric that measures how much it costs to get one user to click on an ad/CTA.
How to use it in a sentence: “We can drive down our CPC by engaging more qualified leads.”
Other terms it relates to: KPI, PPC

Term: Cross-channel
What it means: If each social platform (Insta, TikTok, LinkedIn) is its own channel, cross-channel is when a strategy is used across a number of different platforms. (It’s also what boats that sail between the UK and France do.)
How to use it in a sentence: “Our cross-channel push for the summer season is expected to drive increased revenue.”

Term: Crowdsourcing
What it means: Crowdsourcing is when you use social media to build capital, ideas, content or services from large audiences.
How to use it in a sentence: “We’re looking to crowdsource our office refurb, so if anyone has any old furniture laying around, let us know!”
Other terms it relates to: Follower

Term: CTR
What it means: Click Through Rate. The percentage of people who click on your content, out of all those who see it.
How to use it in a sentence: “It sounds low but across all social platforms, 2% is the average CTR.”
Other terms it relates to: KPI

Term: CVR
What it means: Conversion Rate. The percentage of users who take your desired action after having seen your ad or post.
How to use it in a sentence: “You have to earn trust and nail down tone in order to see a CVR uptick across your socials.”
Other terms it relates to: KPI

d

all social media jargon starting with D

Term: Dark Post
What it means: A social ad that doesn’t appear in the timeline of the advertiser. Instead, the only appear in the feeds of users the advertiser is targeting – a bit like how Farfetch’d only appears East Asian versions of Pokemon games. (It’s true – we didn’t believe it either!) On Instagram, all ads are dark by default – other platforms give their own official-sounding names to dark posts, such as ‘unpublished page posts’ or ‘promoted-only tweets’, but the concept is the same.
How to use it in a sentence: “This ad doesn’t have such a broad appeal across our demographic, so let’s go ahead and make it a dark post.”
Other terms it relates to: Geotargeting, Targeting

Term: Dark Social
What it means: Not to be confused with dark posts. Dark social refers to traffic coming from social media sources that analytics tools struggle to identify; for example, through private links shared in chat messages.
How to use it in a sentence: “Did you know that over 80% of consumer content sharing happens on dark social?”
Other terms it relates to: DM

Term: Disappearing Content
What it means: AKA ephemeral content, these are posts that self-destruct and delete themselves after a set amount of time has passed. Snapchat Stories are a good example.
How to use it in a sentence: “Utilisation of disappearing content is a great marketing strategy to weaponise FOMO.”

Term: DM
What it means: Direct Message. A private message between users.
How to use it in a sentence: “Thanks for joining this webinar, if you have any further questions go ahead and pop them in our DMs.”
Other terms it relates to: Dark social

e

all social media jargon starting with E

Term: Employee Advocacy
What it means: Where a brand or company employee uses their own social media presence to promote the company.
How to use it in a sentence: “This ad doesn’t have such a broad appeal across our demographic, so let’s go ahead and make it a dark post.”
Other terms it relates to: Brand advocate, Organic social media

Term: Emoji
What it means: A small, cartoon-like image that can be sent alongside text to embellish it and add some colour.
How to use it in a sentence: “The space invader is definitely my favourite emoji!”
Other terms it relates to: Bitmoji

Term: Engagement Rate
What it means: A widely adhered-to social metric. Engagement rate measures the amount of user interaction a post yields, including likes, comments and shares.
How to use it in a sentence: “The engagement rate on posts from last month were down – how can we freshen up our strategy?”
Other terms it relates to: Average response time, KPI, Like, Traffic, Viral

Term: Evergreen Content
What it means: Content which keeps its value and doesn’t lose relevancy as time goes by, like good cheese or fine wine. It doesn’t rely on tapping into current topics in order to be engaging.
How to use it in a sentence: “Most of our content has such a short shelf life, it’s a struggle to stay on top of production. Let’s aim to put out more evergreen content.”
Other terms it relates to: Algorithm, Permalink

f

all social media jargon starting with F

Term: Feed
What it means: A generic term for the river of content, created by other users, that appears on your social media – usually, social feed doubles as the network’s homepage.
How to use it in a sentence: “I haven’t seen anything on my feed from them for a while.”
Other terms it relates to: Ad recall lift, Algorithm, Boosted post

Term: Finsta
What it means: ‘Fake Instagram’. This is the name for a person’s ‘secret’ Instagram account, tucked safely away from the prying eyes of their employer.
How to use it in a sentence: “No way my boss can see this – I’ll put it on my Finsta.”

Term: Follower
What it means: A user of social media who has subscribed to see your posts and content. Your follower count is a cornerstone metric for social success.
How to use it in a sentence: “Become a follower today to see more great content!”
Other terms it relates to: Brand advocate, Crowdsourcing, Handle, Qualified lead, Like

Term: Frequency
What it means: Usually used in the context of Facebook or Instagram, frequency refers to the number of times your ad or content was displayed to the average user in your target demographic.
How to use it in a sentence: “Increasing frequency is good practice, but if the number gets too high you might begin to disengage users.”
Other terms it relates to: Impressions, Reach

g

all social media jargon starting with G

Term: Geotag
What it means: A location-identifying tag which users can attach to their content, revealing where it originated.
How to use it in a sentence: “Where are we having the next DnD sesh?” – “The location must not be spoken. Check the geotag from last week’s photo.”
Other terms it relates to: Tagging

Term: Geotargeting
What it means: To hone down the target audience of your content based on location. Instead of blanket bombing an entire country or even continent with all the accuracy of a Storm Trooper, geotargeting allows you to fire off content with laser-guided precision.
How to use it in a sentence: “We’re specifically geotargeting leads in London for our next campaign.”
Other terms it relates to: Dark post, Targeting

Term: GIF
What it means: Graphic Interchange Format. Bitesized animation files and film clips to complement/humourise messaging.
How to use it in a sentence: “Homer disappearing backwards into a hedge, that has to be my all-time favourite GIF.”
Other terms it relates to: Meme, UGC

h

all social media jargon starting with H

Term: Handle
What it means: A handle is the term used to describe someone’s @username on social media. And also the curved gripping aid on the side of a tea mug.
How to use it in a sentence: “Find us on Facebook – our handle is @thebrainslondon. Anyone for tea?”
Other terms it relates to: Bio, Follower, Mention, Tagging

Term: Hashtag
What it means: The # symbol. Attaching this to a trending term on social media is a way of connecting your content with the larger body of posts also plugging into that central, high-traction theme.
How to use it in a sentence: “Follow all the latest Dr. Who news by searching the hashtag #DrWho.”
Other terms it relates to: Social listening, Social media monitoring, Trending topic

Term: Header Image
What it means: Sometimes called a cover image, this is the large image at the top of your social media profile. Many marketing-savvy brands use this area as a place to temporarily advertise content they want to give high exposure; others deploy their header image as a space to really nail down their brand aesthetic.
How to use it in a sentence: “Let’s place a mention of next month’s competition into our header image – maybe we’ll see an increase in engagement.”
Other terms it relates to: Avatar, Bio

i

all social media jargon starting with I

Term: Impressions
What it means: One impression = one user who has seen your content. It’s another important metric to measure the overall visibility, or the reach, of your stuff.
How to use it in a sentence: “On average it takes at least 5 impressions before you even start creating brand awareness.”
Other terms it relates to: Ad recall lift, Boosted post, Frequency, Traffic

Term: Inbound Marketing
What it means: Inbound marketing is an advertising methodology that magnetises your target audience by creating high-value content tailored to them, in a ‘vibe attracts tribe’ kind of way. Inbound marketing provides answers to questions your people are already asking… like showing an ad for the US army’s voluntary research trials when a user Googles ‘how to become Captain America.’
How to use it in a sentence: “Inbound marketing aims to turn prospects into leads, and convert them into customers.”
Other terms it relates to: Organic social media, Paid social media

Term: Insights
What it means: Most of the major social media players provide an ‘Insights’ page, where they offer the user a look under the hood at all the swirling analytics pertaining to their content.
How to use it in a sentence: “I took a look at our insights to figure out what where the highest engagement posts of the year.”
Other terms it relates to: Ads manager, Collective intelligence

j

all social media jargon starting with J

Term: Java
What it means: Java is a all-purpose programming language, which started from humble origins in 1995 and allows developers to write and run code from anywhere in the world.
How to use it in a sentence: “Java is the language of big data, Android, desktop and mobile computing.”
Other terms it relates to: JavaScript

Term: JavaScript
What it means: Another web programming language used by developers, enabling interactive webpages.
How to use it in a sentence: “Implementing JavaScript elements can be used to drive higher engagement.”
Other terms it relates to: Java

k

all social media jargon starting with K

Term: KPI
What it means: Key Performance Indicator. The yardstick used by businesses to measure their progress towards a given goal.
How to use it in a sentence: “Comments, CTR and CVR are our top social media KPIs for this year.”
Other terms it relates to: Analytics, Average response time, CPC, CTR, CVR, Engagement rate, Objectives

Term: Klout
What it means: Consigned to the history books in 2018, Klout was a social tool that gave users a score out of 100 to measure their level of influence online.
How to use it in a sentence: “Before it shut down, Barack Obama had a Klout score of 99.”

l

all social media jargon starting with L

Term: Like
What it means: The original coin of the social media realm! A like is essentially a small token of approval given by one user to another, awarded for content they find valuable in some way.
How to use it in a sentence: “Dishing out an excessive number of Instagram likes day after day can cause your account to become locked.”
Other terms it relates to: Engagement rate, Follower, Vanity metric

Term: Livestream
What it means: Delivering video content over the internet in real time.
How to use it in a sentence: “We’ll be livestreaming our discussion on the greatest DC villains of all time, so stay tuned for that one!”
Other terms it relates to: Visual First, Webinar, YouTube advertising

m

all social media jargon starting with M

Term: Meme
What it means: Usually user-generated, a meme is static image describing a reaction, thought, emotional state or idea in an engaging or comedic way. In generations to come, when all the evidence that remains of our wasted society are the memes we leave behind, our descendants will wonder… what exactly were we trying to say, with images of Kanye West captioned: ‘Yo I’mma let you finish, but…’
How to use it in a sentence: “Our department has a group chat dedicated to sharing top-notch memes.”
Other terms it relates to: GIF, UGC

Term: Mention
What it means: To namedrop another social media user in your post by ‘tagging’ their handle (or @username), which will send them a notification.
How to use it in a sentence: “Let’s aim to mention the new subscribers in our weekly roundup post.”
Other terms it relates to: Handle, Tagging

n

all social media jargon starting with N

Term: Native Advertising
What it means: Native advertising refers to the marketing technique of displaying paid content, such as a boosted post, to users in a way that it appears as organic. Native advertising can be a highly powerful strategy, since posts look and feel natural – great for brand image – but are backed behind the scenes with a little cash, to extend their reach.
How to use it in a sentence: “Going the native advertising route with your social ads takes a little capital, but ensures your content packs extra power in its punches, Superman-style.”
Other terms it relates to: Boosted post, Brand awareness, Organic social media, Reach

Term: Newsjacking
What it means: Riding on the back of topical news stories to push your content or a marketing agenda. Newsjacking allows marketers to capitalise on what’s hot at the moment to appear ultra-relevant. Imagine if, in the Daily Bugle, an insect repellant company published the ad, ‘Spiderman spotted in Lower Manhattan! Discover our anti-spider products now,’ that would be an example newsjacking.
How to use it in a sentence: “Newsjacking is an awesome way to plug right into on-the-minute trends; but you’ve got to have the motivation and resources available to react fast to developing stories.”
Other terms it relates to: Clickbait, Trending topic

о

all social media jargon starting with O

Term: Objectives
What it means: Your objectives are what you want to achieve, your goals; in the context of social media, your objectives determine which KPIs are a bigger focus for your ad strategy.
How to use it in a sentence: “Based on last year’s performance we’ve revised up our objectives to something a little more ambitious.”
Other terms it relates to: KPI

Term: Organic Social Media
What it means: In contrast to paid social, organic social includes activities across social media that don’t lean on paid promotion.
How to use it in a sentence: “Organic social is the best free way to develop and interact naturally with an online demographic.”
Other terms it relates to: Brand advocate, Employee advocacy, Inbound marketing, Native advertising, Social selling, Traffic, Zero cost strategy

p

all social media jargon starting with P

Term: Paid Social Media
What it means: Paid social media is the practice of a brand or business paying to place ads on social – native advertising is a common technique for this.
How to use it in a sentence: “Our competitors have made massive brand awareness gains through utilising paid social – maybe this is something we can look at?”
Other terms it relates to: Boosted post, Inbound marketing, PPC, Traffic

Term: Permalink
What it means: A link to a web page, typically a blog post or main page, that remains unchanged. A bit like Legolas, they look the same forever (or almost forever, anyway).
How to use it in a sentence: “A hyperlink can insulate your company from the risks associated with link rot.”
Other terms it relates to: Evergreen content

Term: PPC
What it means: Pay-per-Click. A style of online advertising where you only pay when an internet user actually clicks on your link – you don’t pay a dime for the ad placement itself.
How to use it in a sentence: “PPC is commonly associated with traffic metrics. It’s a primary strategy for getting users on landing pages.”
Other terms it relates to: CPC, Paid social media, Targeting

q

all social media jargon starting with Q

Term: QR Code
What it means: You know those crazy, black-and-white pixelated boxes you can scan with your phone, that take you to a specific webpage? That’s a QR code. It encodes specific data in its unique composition.
How to use it in a sentence: “Take away the hassle of asking people to manually type a URL by directing customers to your landing page via a QR code.”

Term: Qualified Lead
What it means: A prospect or user who has demonstrated a previous interest in your goods or service; essentially, someone you know to have seen your name as they’ve been browsing for something, as opposed to regular and random passers-by. An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a user who has been earmarked by the marketing team as particularly promising; an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is a user who has moved through the marketing pipeline and is ready to interact with your sales team.
How to use it in a sentence: “These users downloaded our free e-book on the making of Stranger Things, so let’s add them to the stack of qualified leads we can market merchandise to.”
Other terms it relates to: Ad recall lift, Follower, Social selling

r

all social media jargon starting with R

Term: Reach
What it means: Reach is a term to describe how widely your brand or post visibility extends. The more people who know your brand and see your stuff, the bigger your reach.
How to use it in a sentence: “We’ll need to expand our reach to include continental audiences if we want to tackle the European market.”
Other terms it relates to: Analytics, Boosted post, Frequency, Native advertising, Traffic

Term: Retargeting
What it means: The technique of putting ads in front of users who have previously demonstrated an interest in your brand, goods or services.
How to use it in a sentence: “This group of users visited our homepage within the last month, so let’s retarget them across our socials.”
Other terms it relates to: Targeting

s

all social media jargon starting with S

Term: Sentiment Analysis
What it means: The process of analysing reactions to a piece of content to gauge an audience’s overall mood. Marketers can investigate sentiment analysis to light up the best path forward for their content – ‘people like this, people don’t like this.’
How to use it in a sentence: “We need to get a read on the audience mood. Let’s gather some sentiment analysis of our organic Instagram content.”
Other terms it relates to: Analytics, Collective intelligence

Term: Social Listening
What it means: Social listening is the way social media managers keep a track of conversations and user movements around core trends. Usually, they’ll utilise a specialised piece of software for dedicated projects that monitor all aspects of social media to yield insight into what people are talking about, and the way they’re talking about it.
How to use it in a sentence: “Let’s do some thorough social listening around the Baby Yoda theme before we bring it into our strategy. We need to establish if it garners broadly positive reactions.”
Other terms it relates to: Collective intelligence, Hashtag, Trending topic

Term: Social Media Monitoring
What it means: Essentially a pared-down version of social listening. Social media monitoring is to keep an eye on your own business social accounts, but more passively, and following conversations more casually.
How to use it in a sentence: “We don’t have the resources available right now for social listening software, so let’s keep on with social media monitoring this year.”
Other terms it relates to: Hashtag, Trending topic

Term: Social Proof
What it means: Ready for a bit of marketing psychology? First espoused by Robert Caldini in his 1984 work, Influence: Science and Practice, social proof is the psycho-social phenomena whereby individuals emulate the actions of others in a given situation, in order to assimilate smoothly and achieve social harmony. Pretty interesting, right? It sounds wild but keep an eye out; you’ll see it in all kinds of situations. In a social media context, positive social proof is related to high levels of engagement, where users trust the word and recommendations of other users.
How to use it in a sentence: “‘2 of my friends shared this long-read, so it must be good content.’ That’s the essence of social proof within social media.”
Other terms it relates to: Collective intelligence

Term: Social Selling
What it means: Social selling is where members of your company’s sales team utilise social media to build relationships and interact with potential customers, with a view to moving them along the marketing funnel and eventually converting them.
How to use it in a sentence: “Social selling has been one of our most cost-effective ROI drivers.”
Other terms it relates to: Organic social media, Qualified lead

t

all social media jargon starting with T

Term: Tagging
What it means: To link a piece of content to another user.
How to use it in a sentence: “Upload photos of your entry to our Top Summer Bakes Competition, and don’t forget to tag us in the description!”
Other terms it relates to: Geotag, Handle, Mention

Term: Targeting
What it means: The selection of a specific demographic to shoot for with your advertising strategy.
How to use it in a sentence: “This campaign leans into a heavy retro, vintage-gaming aesthetic, so let’s target users born before 1990 for this one.”
Other terms it relates to: Dark post, Geotargeting, PPC, Retargeting

Term: Traffic
What it means: The flow of users to your site, a specific webpage or social accounts. Unlike on the roads, high traffic is good. Also, social platforms don’t discriminate between ‘vehicles’. Unlike with cars, bikes or e-scooters -mobile users, desktop surfers, it all counts for the same online.
How to use it in a sentence: “We’re seeing really great traffic on our Twitter lately, so let’s align some more advertising budget there.”
Other terms it relates to: Brand awareness, Engagement rate, Impressions, Organic social media, Paid social media, Reach

Term: Trending Topic
What it means: A theme or topic that has experienced a sudden surge in popularity across a wide user-base. ‘ET’ might become a trending topic, for instance, if Steven Spielberg were to sign a massive multi-million exclusive with Netflix.
How to use it in a sentence: “Let’s take a look at the trending topics for the week. Are there any marketing opportunities we could potentially leverage?”
Other terms it relates to: Hashtag, Newsjacking, Social listening, Social media monitoring, Viral

Term: Troll
What it means: A user who is known to intentionally cause controversy or stir up trouble in online discussions.
How to use it in a sentence: “We want to maximise user interaction, but don’t get dragged into damaging back-and-forths with trolls.”
Other terms it relates to: AMA

u

all social media jargon starting with U

Term: UGC
What it means: User Generated Content. Images, blogs, photos, videos… any type of online content which has been created by consumers in a non-professional capacity.
How to use it in a sentence: “Our new range of handheld milk frothers has gotten some great reaction – could we look to UGC as a way of supporting the campaign?”
Other terms it relates to: GIF, Meme

v

all social media jargon starting with V

Term: Vanity Metric
What it means: Vanity metrics are stats and figures that give you a rose-tinted view of your social performance, when the reality may not be quite so positive. For instance, a huge number of Facebook likes looks great, but doesn’t mean a whole lot if most of those likes stop there.
How to use it in a sentence: “We need to put together an end of year report on social performance across all metrics. I don’t want to see vanity metrics or filler content – let’s keep it sharp and relevant.”
Other terms it relates to: Like

Term: Viral
What it means: A piece of content which blows up on social media and, exponentially, gets shared a massive number of times over a relatively short period.
How to use it in a sentence: “If you get lucky, and a blog post goes viral, you’ll be in digital marketing dreamland.”
Other terms it relates to: Engagement rate, Trending topic

Term: Visual First
What it means: The idea of image or video-centric content dominating social media, rather than other formats.
How to use it in a sentence: “These days, it’s not enough to only put out regular text-encoded content. That stuff is great, but you need to complement it with a visual-first strategy to really get ahead of the competition.”
Other terms it relates to: Livestream, Webinar, YouTube advertising

w

all social media jargon starting with W

Term: Webinar
What it means: An online seminar, discussion, lecture or workshop hosted by a company, often with the purpose of educating users. Webinars are usually free to attend but may require some information-exchange – a name and an email address, for instance.
How to use it in a sentence: “Our new range of handheld milk frothers has gotten some great reaction – could we look to UGC as a way of supporting the campaign?”
Other terms it relates to: Livestream, Visual first

x

all social media jargon starting with X

Term: XML Sitemap
What it means: Extensible Markup Language – one for the developers and coders here. Basically, a sitemap is a bird’s eye view of your site to help the search engine bots crawl it more effectively, and XML is the language it’s written in.
How to use it in a sentence: “Our search engine rankings have taken a hit lately -could there be a problem with the XML?”

y

all social media jargon starting with Y

Term: YouTube Advertising
What it means: A lot of companies overlook YouTube when drawing up their social media marketing battleplan. The fact is, in our visual world, YouTube is a social platform and presents a gigantic area of opportunity for marketers. It comes under the Google umbrella, too, so it’s not too much of a stretch to roll out some of your campaigns onto YouTube.
How to use it in a sentence: “Let’s explore YouTube as a space to squeeze some more mileage out of this campaign.”
Other terms it relates to: Livestream, Visual first

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all social media jargon starting with Z

Term: Zero Cost Strategy
What it means: Exactly what it says on the tin! A marketing campaign that can be executed with no capital or financial backing. Some advertisers turn