If you’re new to the world of social media marketing, the jargon can be overwhelming (to say the least). This blog will briefly explain the most common terms and their meanings in Social media world. For some people, scrolling, posting, liking, sharing, and retweeting is a way to pass the time. For others, especially businesses, social media is often a daunting and overwhelming item on their marketing to-do list.
This is probably what your business knows it should be doing, but
Where do you start?
What platform should you use?
How often should you post?
If you are posting already, are you doing it right?
For other companies, social media is something they’re already doing, but it can be an underutilized tool. Can it be really complicated? And will it really help your business? (Both answers are yes!).
The platform itself and the “rules” about what is and isn’t allowed seem to change weekly, sometimes daily. It means you don’t have it. Instead, they rely on digitally savvy agencies to tackle the vast world of social media.
Like many industries, social media marketing is a field with its own language. Those of us who use jargon on a daily basis often find new customers using terms they’ve never heard of (and come back to explain them). So why not make a mini glossary? Below we’ve compiled the top 10 terms new social media clients ask us and their definitions.
Social Media Terms and Definitions
1. Take
Like many of these terms, this is an everyday word with a more nuanced meaning in the world of social media. A post can be defined as a “take” if it asks the user to do something useful for the business (contact, buy, click a link). Conversely, a “giving” post provides readers with useful information or resources. For example, if you post a photo of your CEO’s dog on #NationalDogDay, it’s a giveaway. When you post a photo of your CEO’s dog and entice followers to visit your site to see more of your line of incredibly cute dog sweaters, it’s a “take.”
It’s always best to balance give and take on social media platforms. At Meld, we coordinate the give-and-take cadence of our clients’ social media postings with their key marketing goals.
2. Engagement
In social media, an interaction is any kind of interaction a user has with your brand on social media. This can take many forms such as likes, shares, and comments. However, it’s important to remember that these aren’t the only types of engagement. Engagement can be through social media posts or the profile itself.
For example, engagement includes clicking to expand a post’s caption and ‘more’, checking in at a business location, or tagging a brand’s business page in a post.
3. vanity metric
Many people tend to confuse the engagement and vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are something a person is likely to pay attention to on social media. The number of likes, followers and comments. While these numbers are significant, they are not indicative of social media success. We do not measure ROI in the same way as click-through rates (see below) or other social media metrics. Having hundreds of likes on a post or having more followers to help your post reach more people is great, but at the end of the day, double-tapping a post or clicking follow Don’t worry too much about the number of people who press or button. Instead, focus on the engagement as a whole.
4. Organic social media
No, organic in this case does not mean GMO free. Instead, an organic post is a social media post that is not promoted with advertising dollars and is not part of a paid promotion. All posts you create on your personal social media are organic posts and cannot be sponsored or promoted with advertising dollars. Posts from Company Pages, on the other hand, have the opportunity to be promoted with ad dollars for more visibility and engagement.Posts are considered organic until they accrue ad dollars. It then counts as a paid ad or sponsored post.
Why put money behind items?
As platforms like Facebook and Instagram have updated their algorithms over the years, the reach of organic posts has been steadily declining. Currently, Facebook’s organic reach is less than 1%. That means less than 1% of her people who like or follow your business won’t see your post unless there’s money behind it. This creates a “pay-to-play” feel, where advertising dollars are almost necessary to get the kind of exposure many brands seek on social media.
5. Dark Post
A dark post is a social media ad that does not appear on the posting company’s profile. Dark posts appear as ads in people’s news feeds, but are considered “private” because they can’t be found or seen on a business’s profile like regular posts. Conversely, light posts are the exact opposite. Posts that appear on your profile or timeline even if they are promoted with ad dollars.
Messed up? Let’s go back to this example post about the CEO’s dog. Post this as an organic post in your newsfeed and later promote it with your ad dollars so it’s an easy post for anyone to see when they visit your profile. If you created this post as an “unpublished” promotional post in her Facebook Ads Manager, it would be a dark post. This means that users who click on your profile won’t see your post, but if they’re part of your audience, they may see it as an ad in your news feed.
6. Click through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (often abbreviated as CTR) is a social media metric that measures the percentage of people who saw a social post or ad and clicked (read more, followed a link, etc.). CTR is considered a very useful metric as it determines how successful your content is at driving people to take actions (clicks) or to your website. In practice, CTR goes beyond social media and is used by many digital platforms (such as Google) to measure results, so it’s important to understand. CTR is calculated by dividing the number of post clicks by the total number of post impressions. What is considered a “good” CTR varies by industry and digital platform.
7. Cost Per Click (CPC)
Cost-per-click (often abbreviated as CPC) is a social media metric that measures the average cost of clicking an ad. CPC is a useful metric because it helps you determine which content is most cost-effective. A lower CPC means you can get more traffic for less, and a higher CPC means you pay more for the traffic you get. Like CTR, CPC is actually a more digital metric as it can be used to measure costs across many digital platforms. For example, how much did you have to pay for one click on Google Ads? CPC is determined by dividing the total cost of this post by the number of clicks on this post. Like CTR, CPC varies by industry and digital platform.
8. Community Management
Of course, it’s not enough to just publish your post, spend your ad dollars to promote it, and let nature take its course. This is where community management comes into play.
Community management is the process of creating, growing, and managing a company’s or in other words, community her managers interact with online audiences, such as customers, business partners, and other employers to help grow an online “community” around the brand.
In social media, community management takes many forms. Reacting and replying to comments. Engage with people who have tagged your business in their posts. Reviews review and curation. And the list goes on. Community management is somewhat related to crisis management, a term that essentially boils down to damage control. Crisis management is about responding to social media events and interactions that can damage your brand’s reputation and image.
For example, you can hide inappropriate comments on posts or reply to negative reviews on Facebook. Crisis management typically includes rapid response to prevent the situation from escalating and to minimize potential reputational damage.
9. Impression
For social media, an “impression” is defined as a social media metric that counts the number of times a social post or ad appears in a user’s feed. Note that impressions only track the number of times your post appears in the feed, not whether someone reacted to your post.
So impressions don’t give much useful information about whether users actually like your content or find it helpful, but it’s still a useful number. Impressions should not be confused with reach, which is the number of people who see your post or ad. Impressions are almost always higher than reach because users can see posts multiple times in their feed.
If a post is visible to only one user (very small audience) and the post is visible twice in that user’s feed, the post has a reach of 1 but is considered 2 impressions .
10. Cadence
Cadence can be thought of as frequency. Cadence may also apply to certain social media campaigns or series.
Let’s say you want to start a campaign called “Wag Wednesday” where you post pictures of your employees’ dogs every Wednesday. It’s about setting a rhythm with a particular series of posts. Relying on external sources can help you get (and keep) your cadence on track and have a consistent presence across platforms. Setting a rhythm helps build trust in your brand from your followers.
Jeopardy! Runs every day at 4:00 PM, or Wheel of Fortune runs at 6:30 PM. A deliberate, sure rhythm is something that audiences like, whether they are conscious of it or not.
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