The Essential Social Media Marketing Dictionary
As a business owner or employee, navigating the jargon of the social media marketing world can leave one feeling out of touch and confused. Here is a helpful short list of all essential social media marketing terms and their definitions.
A
Analytics: The discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. For example, looking at the data for all visitors to your different social media outlets, analyzing the trends, then making an informed decision based on the data to adjust advertisements and grow your business.
B
B2B: Stands for Business-to-Business. Any business that markets to another business would fall into this category. An example would be a car manufacturer employing an accountancy firm to audit their finances, or a food manufacturer purchasing various ingredients.
B2C: Stands for Business-to-Consumer. Any business that markets to consumers would fall into this category. An example would be a tech company selling computers (direct to consumer) or a clothing company selling clothes. Many companies are considered to be involved in both B2B and B2C marketing.
Blogging: A blog is a growing collection of online articles, videos, photos, and other content maintained by an individual or group of people. For example, this article is a blog post that is part of our social media marketing blog.
Buyer Persona: A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer.
C
Content Marketing: Any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers. Such content could be news, videos, white papers, e-books, infographics, email newsletters, case studies, podcasts, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, blogs etc.
E
Engagement Rate: A metric that measures the amount of engagement that a piece of created content is receiving from an audience, such as people commenting, sharing, and liking a piece of content.
H
Handle: A username tag that is unique to your account. Our company handle on each company account is @Symmetricalmm. Choosing the same handle on each possible account is an important component of our symmetrical strategy.
Hashtag: A word or phrase preceded by a hash or pound sign (#) and is used to identify messages on a specific topic. This is used all across different social media sites. Searching for that hashtag will then present each piece of content that has been tagged with it. So for instance on the photo-sharing service Instagram and the micro-blogging platform Twitter the hashtag #Balancesmm (our brand hashtag) allows users to find images that have been tagged with our business.
I
Instant Messaging (IM): Chatting over text online in real-time.
K
Keyword: A word or phrase that describes the contents of a web page. Keywords act as shortcuts that help search engines to rank and catagorize web pages.
M
Memes: A funny image, video, piece of text, etc., that becomes popular and is spread rapidly by internet users. Memes often go through different variations as users change them. An example of some famous memes are Philosoraptor and Bad Luck Brian.
N
News Feed: A continuous transmission of data, consisting of news updates. For instance, a Facebook news feed consists of a stream of all your friends posted updates.
O
Off-Page Optimization: The process that involves all processes external to the website that can affect its search engine reach and results, such as social media accounts.
P
Pay-per-click Advertisements: a digital marketing model that is used to direct traffic to a particular website in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the advertisement is clicked.
R
Retweet: A reposted or forwarded message on Twitter.
Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI): A metric used to measure the overall effectiveness of a marketing campaign.
S
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): the process of promoting a website by increasing its visibility in search engine results pages through paid advertising. It often incorporates pay-per-click advertisements and search engine optimization.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results. Words, titles, links, and reputation all effect how visible your website is going to be.
Social Media Marketing (SMM): Leveraging sites that allow people or companies to create, share, or exchange information, career interests, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks. Social media provides brands the opportunity to leverage a new revolutionary interactive form of digital marketing.
"I liken search engine marketing to renting a hotel room, social media marketing to a vacation home and your (search engine optimized) website to your permanent home. You ultimately need to spend most of your time maintaining your home. However, you will want to regularly maintain your vacation home whereas your hotel room will only be of temporary use to you." - Andrew C. Belton, Owner of Symmetrical Media Marketing
T
Trending Topic: The subject of many posts on a social media website within a short period of time.
U
Uniform Resource Locator (URL): The address of a World Wide Web page.
User Experience (UX): A person's emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service.
S
Social Media Monitoring: A process of using social media channels to track and gather the information and data of certain individuals or groups.
T
Tag: Allows users to create a link back to the profile of the person shown in the picture or targeted by the user. Used mainly on Facebook and Instagram.
If you have any questions or would like assistance with social media marketing contact us and visit our social media resources page.
Written by: Jonathan Dacosta
Edited by: Andrew C. Belton
