Glossary

A

A/B Test

A/B testing is running an experiment to see what version of something resonates best with your audience. On social media, you might A/B test Instagram captions or the top converting CTA tests on Facebook.

Algorithm

An algorithm is a set of formulas developed for a computer to perform a certain function. This is important in the social sphere as the algorithms sites like Facebook and Google use are critical for developing content promotion strategies.

Audience

Your social media audience is your followers and the people you hope to reach. For example, an ad campaign on Facebook might target people who’ve liked your page and lookalike audiences that you’re hoping to draw in.

B

BeReal

BeReal is a dual-camera app that prompts users once a day to take a picture at a random time during the day. Users have 1 minute to take a picture and are encouraged to be real (authentic) by sharing an unaltered and staged look into their current moment.

Bitly

Bitly is a free URL shortening service that provides statistics for the links users share online. Bitly is popularly used to condense long URLs to make them easier to share on social networks such as Twitter.

Boost

Boosting on social media means paying a platform to amplify one of your posts for more reach. In META, this is similar to a paid ad campaign, but lacks the same audience segmenting capabilities.

C

Canva

Canva is an easy-to-use design tool for non-designers and designers alike. It offers several templates that adhere to the required dimensions for sharable social images on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Carousel

A carousel is social media content that contains multiple images that viewers can swipe through.

Clickbait

Clickbait is a term to describe marketing or advertising content that employs a sensationalized headline to attract clicks. They rely heavily on the "curiosity gap" by creating just enough interest to provoke engagement.

Clickthrough Rate

Click-Through Rate or CTR is a very popular social media marketing term which forms part of almost every activity on any social media platform.  is a measure of the percentage of users that click on your post. It is calculated by dividing the number of link clicks by post impressions or the number of views. The higher the CTR score, the better for a business.

Close Friends

Close Friends is a private and curated list of friends that someone can close-friend-only Instagram Stories with.

Comment

A comment is a response that is often provided as an answer or reaction to a blog post or message on a social network.

Connections

The LinkedIn equivalent of a Facebook 'friend' is a 'connection.' Because LinkedIn is a social networking site, the people you are connecting with are not necessarily people you are friends with, but rather professional contacts that you've met, heard speak, done business with, or know through another connection. Connections are categorized by: 1st degree, 2nd degree, and 3rd degree.

Conversion Rate

This is one of the important social media marketing terms. Conversion Rate refers to the percentage of users who follow through a social post or ad’s call to action. This can be a download, purchase, filling out a form, clicking a CTA, or some other desired action depending upon the marketer’s conversion goal. Conversion rate is one of the top indicators of a company’s marketing strategy performance.

Cost per mille (CPM)

Cost per mille means cost per thousand, or the amount you’d pay for an ad for every thousand impressions a social ad gets.

D

Direct Message (or DM)

Direct messages -- also referred to as "DMs" -- are private conversations that occur on social media platforms. Typically, both parties must follow one another to send a message.

Discover (or Snapchat Discover)

Discover is a section of Snapchat's app dedicated to large brands, influencers, and longer-form story content.

Disappearing content

Disappearing content on social media is anything shared with a time limit, like Snapchat stories and BeReals.

E

Endorsement

An endorsement on LinkedIn refers to an instance in which another LinkedIn user recognizes you for one of the skills you have listed on your profile.

Engagement Rate

Engagement rate is a metric that tells how much interaction a social media post earns from followers. It is calculated as the percentage of users who engaged with your post out of the total number who viewed it. A good engagement rate (1-4%) indicates an effective social media marketing campaign.

Ephemeral Content

Ephemeral content refers to social media content that disappears after a specific period of time.

F

Facebook

Facebook is a social media platform founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. The site connects people with friends, family, acquaintances, and businesses from all over the world and enables them to post, share, and engage with a variety of content such as photos and status updates. The platform currently boasts around 2.11 billion users.

Fans

Fans is the term used to describe people who like your Facebook Page.

Favorite

Represented by the small star icon on Twitter, “favoriting” a tweet signals to the creator that you liked their content or post.

Feed

A feed contains all the content uploaded by the accounts someone follows on social media. Feed is an Instagram-specific term, but other platforms have their version, like Timeline on Twitter and For You Page on TikTok.

Follower

In social media marketing terms, a follower is a user who has subscribed to view your posts. A brand's number of followers is a key metric of how the social media audience is engaging with the brand.

Forums

Also known as a message board, a forum is an online discussion site (like Reddit). It originated as the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board and was a technological evolution of the dial-up bulletin board system.

Follower

In a social media setting, a follower refers to a person who subscribes to your account in order to receive your updates.

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.

#FYP (For Your Page)

A TikTok For You Page features videos that are algorithmically curated to an individual user's likes based on their behavior on the app. #FYP is also a hashtag that TikTok users place in their videos to prioritize their content on other users' "Your Page" feed. This feed algorithmically sends users content from people you follow or related to hashtags you might be interested in.

G

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.

Groups

Facebook and LinkedIn offer a Groups feature where people in similar industries or passions can join a group and discuss related topics.

Grid

A grid is an overview of the content on someone's Instagram and TikTok profile that displays several of their recent posts. You can click on an image or video in someone's grid to view an individual post.

H

Handle

Handle is the term used to describe someone's @username on Twitter. For example, HubSpot's Twitter handle is @HubSpot.

Header image

A header image is the large photo displayed at the top of your Twitter profile. It is also commonly referred to as the banner image on LinkedIn or the cover image on Facebook.

Hashtag

A hashtag (#) is a word or phrase preceded by a ‘#’ sign used to connect posts on social media to other posts on the same subject or a trending topic. Hashtags are a way to make it easier for users to search for posts related to specific topics.

I

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times your content has been shown on the feeds of social media users. A viewer doesn’t need to engage with a post in order for it to be counted as an impression

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is partnering with content creators in specific niches and leveraging the relationship and trust they have with their audience to reach a specific goal, like driving sales.

Insights

Many social media networks, like Facebook or Instagram, offer insights pages to their business account holders. These pages hey can include:

Audience demographics:

Information about the age, gender, and location of a brand's audience

Customer sentiment

How an audience feels about a brand or a specific campaign

Content performance

How well a brand's content performs, and what content resonates best with the audience

Best times to post

When is the best time of day to post content so that the audience is most likely to see it

Opportunities for improvement

What can be improved based on customer feedback and comments

Instagram

Instagram is a photo and video sharing application that lets users upload content and share it instantly on the app with their followers.

Instagram Live

Instagram Live lets businesses and individuals share a live broadcast of their current activities.

K

KPI

A numeric unit used to measure the progress of your social marketing strategies and campaign goals. KPIs are frequently used to track progress in brand awareness, lead generation, sales conversions, etc.

L

Like

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.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site with over 930 million members in over 200 countries and territories. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking.

Live-streaming

Social media live-streaming is a way of using eye-catching content to reach your audience on channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in real-time. Live-streaming helps boost your brand’s positioning in the news feed algorithms of channels.

Lurker

A lurker online is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, social network, or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates in the discussion.

M

Meme

In the social media context, the meme is a text, video, or images that is spread through social media platforms, especially for humorous purposes. Memes go viral, and users get in by creating their own variations and sharing them.
Sometimes, brands capitalize on the latest memes to engage and connect with younger audiences, but you need more than a healthy sense of humor to pull off meme marketing.

Mention

A mention is a Twitter term used to describe an instance in which a user includes someone else's @username in their tweet to attribute a piece of content or start a discussion.

Metric

A metric is a point of measurement, like click-through rate or impressions.

Mute

People can mute accounts on social media that they don’t want to see content from anymore.

N

Native Advertising

Native advertising on social media is the technique of showing paid content to users in such a way that it looks organic. Examples of native ads are promoted Facebook posts, which appear similar to regular posts in user’s feeds.

News Feed

A news feed is literally a feed full of news. On Facebook, the News Feed is the homepage of users' accounts, where they can see all the latest updates from their friends. The news feed on Twitter is called a Timeline.

O

Organic

Organic social media is the free, non-paid content that users and businesses share on social media platforms. It's a way to build a genuine connection with an audience by providing valuable content that resonates with them.

Organic Reach

Organic reach is the number of people who see your content without paid ads or any form of sponsored content.

P

Paid social

Paid social is any advertisements or marketing messages you pay to share on social media sites.

Pin

Pinning content is keeping it at the top of your social media profile to increase engagement or share important messages with your followers. You can pin content to the top of your Instagram grid, Twitter profile, or TikTok page.

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 & Drink, Women's Fashion, Gardening, etc. Users have the ability to "pin" and "repin" content that they like to their respective boards.

Platform

Platform means a social media network, like YouTube or TikTok.

Post

A post is the content you share on social media.

Q

R

Reach

Reach is the number of people who can see the content you share on social media, whether they follow you or not. Reach is different from impressions, which is the total number of times content is displayed on users' feeds, including repeated views by the same user.

Reel

A Reel is an Instagram video. A video shared to Stories or is not a Reel, but you can turn into one Reel by saving it and re-uploading it as a Reel.

Reddit

Reddit is a social news site that contains specific, topic-oriented communities of users who share and comment on stories.

Retargeting

Retargeting is an online marketing and advertising technique that allows marketers to display ads to people who have visited their website or are part of their contact database. As of 2024, this is no longer a HIPPA-compliant practice.

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.

ROI

Return on investment is the amount of money you make from a social media campaign compared to the amount you spend to run it.

S

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of unpaid traffic to a website from search engines.

Shadowban

Shadowban is when a social media platform hides or restricts someone's content without notifying them. It typically happens after a community guidelines violation.

Share

Share refers to how many times a piece of content has been reposted on social media. There is a clickable ‘share’ feature on social media platforms that allows you to repost other user’s content to your own timeline or newsfeed.
Shareable content or content that is useful, entertaining, and inspiring is more likely to get shared by users on social media.

Snapchat

Snapchat is a social 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 and drawings to their snaps and control the list of recipients in which they send them to.

Story

A social media story is a collection of images and short videos that can be shared with other users. It disappears after 24 hours, making it ephemeral. Marketers use social media's storytelling aspect to tell stories about brands, products, or services.

Social Inbox

Social Inbox is an app in the HubSpot software that plugs into your contacts database and allows users to optimize their social monitoring, publishing, and analysis.

Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is a process of monitoring and responding to mentions related to a business that occur in social media.

Social Proof

Social proof refers to a psychological phenomenon in which people seek direction from those around them to determine how they are supposed to act or think in a given situation. In social media, social proof can be identified by the number of interactions a piece of content receives or the number of followers you have. The thought is that if others are sharing something or following someone, it must be good.

Sponsored

Sponsored typically refers to an influencer or creator paid by a business to share content promoting its product or service.

Subreddit

Discussion board dedicated to a specific topic on reddit.

Subscriber(s)

On YouTube, a subscriber “follows” someone’s profile. On other social media sites, a subscriber is someone who pays for access to exclusive content.

T

Targeting

Targeting is a social media marketing term that refers to how you target a specific audience to display ads and posts. Most social advertising platforms allow advertisers to define, identify audiences based on age, location, gender, and other demographics. Your social media target audience consists of people you want to appeal to, which will help develop your brand guidelines.

Tag

Tagging is a social media functionality commonly used on Facebook and Instagram that allows users to create a link back to the profile of the person shown in the picture or targeted by the update.

Thread

A series of comments or discussion posts on a post or in a subreddit.

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 bitesized looping videos that can also have musical overlays.

Traffic

Social traffic refers to all user visits to a website or mobile application. Social traffic includes all traffic coming from social networks. Increasing social media traffic is a common marketing objective, realized by building a larger presence on social media and getting people to see or engage with your content.

Trending Topic

Trending topics refer to the most talked about topics and hashtags on a social media network. These commonly appear on networks like Twitter and Facebook and serve as clickable links in which users can either click through to join the conversation or simply browse the related content.

Troll

A troll or internet troll refers to a person who is known for creating controversy in an online setting. They typically hang out in forums, comment sections, and chat rooms with the intent of disrupting the conversation on a piece of content by providing commentary that aims to evoke a reaction.

U

User-Generated Content (or UGC)

User-generated content is content — blogs, videos, photos, quotes, etc. — consumers create. Marketers typically tap into their audience online to collect this type of content to support a campaign or initiative.

V

Verified

Being verified on social media means someone's profile is certified to be real and owned by who the profile says it is. It helps businesses threatened by impressions or fakes.

Vine

Founded in 2012 and discontinued in 2017, Vine was a social video sharing service where users could create and engage with short-form, six-second video clips. Videos  were easily shared across other social platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Viral

Viral is a term used to describe an instance in which a piece of content -- YouTube video, blog article, photo, etc. -- achieves noteworthy awareness. Viral distribution relies heavily on word of mouth and the frequent sharing of one particular piece of content all over the internet.

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.

W

Webinar

A webinar is an online seminar or presentation hosted by an individual or a company. Most often, the host requires attendees to fill out a form before granting them access to stream the audio and slides. In marketing, webinars are held to educate audiences about a particular topic while opening up the floor for a discussion to occur on social media using the webinar's unique hashtag.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp is a messaging, phone, and social media app that allows people to connect internationally over a Wi-Fi network.

Y

YouTube

Although YouTube is technically a search engine, it is also considered a social media platform because you can share content with “followers” (subscribers) and foster communities through interaction and engagement.

YouTube Shorts

YouTube shorts are short-form videos up to 60 seconds in length. They’re an additional way to share snackable videos with your audience.

Z