Welcome to Social media Glossary.
Sometimes social media marketing terms can be confusing.
This this glossary will simplify most of the marketing jargon, terminologies, and phrases that you’ll come across throughout your social media journey.
We’ve arranged it in alphabetical order for easy scanning.
We’ll update it every month since the marketing landscape changes just as frequently as people do.
Without much ado, let’s jump right in.
A/B Testing
This refers to testing different versions of the same ad from the same campaign to measure which of the options performs best.
It involves creating multiple versions with of the same ad with differences. It could be the image options, texts, video or any other interactive format.
For good AB testing practice, each version would consecutively with the same budget spend. After, you measure important metrics to determine a winner.
The metrics may include website clicks, profile views, impressions, signups, purchases, etc. A/B tests could also extend to Version C and Version D.
Ad Copy
An ad copy is a written body of text that is used in creating any form of content, whether text, video, audio or audio-visual. It’s used for for promotions and advertisement to influence a customer to take a particular action.
Ad Network
An Ad Network is an online advertising network that offers advertisers or marketers placements on the web to place their ads. These networks have a large inventory that comprises different publishing sites, blogs, and even mobile apps.
Ad networks allow for different formats including banner ads, native ads, and even video.
Advertising budget
This refers to the total budget that is spent on a particular advertising campaign. Your marketing budget can determine the results you get from a campaign, especially when you’re working with an experienced marketer.
Affiliate marketing
This is the process of marketing a third-party product in return for a commissions on sales.
Some businesses can give you a unique link to share with your audience. Anyone the converts after clicking your link will attract a compensation.
Other use referral codes or coupons.
Affiliate network
An affiliate network connects a large pool of publishers, bloggers, content creators to companies in need of promotion for their products or services. The network often offers reporting tools for tracking, guides and resources to enable affiliates to be successful in their marketing efforts.
Algorithm
The algorithm is a series of rules and instructions telling a platform how to transform a set of data and facts into useful information that will be relevant to the users.
Social media platforms and search engines have algorithms that guide how content shared on the platform is interpreted. This influences the extent to which content is promoted, content visibility, and the number of times that it appears on a user’s feed.
Average Engagement Rate
The average engagement rate is the percentage of interaction an audience has with a brand’s content on its social network in a given period.
Average Order Value
An average order value is the average value of each purchase a customer makes.
Average Response Time
It’s the average amount of time it takes a brand rep or teammate to reply to inquiries and comments from the brand’s audience on social media.
Average Revenue Per Customer
The average revenue per customer is the average amount a customer spends on a brand. It is calculated by dividing annual revenue by annual customer count.
Average Position
Average Position is the average position of a brand’s ad on the results page of a search engine. Note: The top position on the page is 1.
Analytics
Analytics an online tool on various social media platforms that allows you to measure the performance of advertising campaigns, promotional content and organic content.
It’s a reporting tool comprising different features that help you identify best performing posts, least performing posts, campaigns with the most conversion rates, and so on.
It gives insight into consumer behavior to plan better social media campaigns.
Audience segmentation
This involves segmenting audiences into different categories based on demographics, psychographics or geographic locations. Audience segmentation enables you to effectively communicate and advertise to each group, speaking to their peculiarities such as interests, life goals, internal needs, and various important aspects.
Audience Growth Rate
Your audience growth rate is the rate at which your brand gains or loses audience members per platform, calculated by dividing new members by the total audience members.
B2B
This refers to Business to Business transactions. In B2B marketing, a business markets a product or a service directly to other businesses, in contrast to selling to consumers.
Bounce rate
This is the rate at which users who visit your website exit without triggering any other actions on any page. This is called a bounce, a single page session that is recorded when a user opens a page and exits abruptly. It is calculated as the single page session divided by all the sessions that were taken on your website.
Brand
A brand is the overall perceptions and feelings that the majority of your direct, indirect customers and prospects have about your business. A brand is not a physical entity.
Rather it is an intrinsic entity that exists mainly in the mind of your audience. A brand is an ecosystem of brand assets, visual identity, verbal identity, experiences of consumers that enables people to make a unique distinction of a business from other millions of businesses.
Brand Awareness
Your Brand Awareness is the total number of times your brand is mentioned online within a certain period.
Brand Evangelists
These are the customers that loyally promote a brand, judging from their level of influence on social media.
Brand Identity
A brand identity is the physical assets of a brand that makes it distinguishable from other businesses. This includes both verbal and visual identity, consisting of how your brand looks, sounds and relates with your customers.
Assets such as logos, colors, typography, tone of voice are some factors that play into a brand identity.
It guides the representation of a brand across different customer touchpoints such as websites, social media, print media, etc.
Brand Image
Brand image is a psychological measure of how your consumers feel about your brand. It is a set of beliefs and notions held by consumers. A business can shape its brand image to fit into the desired vision and goals.
A brand image can either be positive or negative depending on branding efforts.
Brand Manager
This is a person responsible for managing all aspects of a given brand, including developing new campaigns and identifying opportunities to push the success of the brand.
Branded Assets
Branded assets refers to any digital material or file used for branding purposes or marketing activities. This could be brand guidelines, visual and verbal identity documents, branded hashtags, custom filters and games.
Branding
Branding is the process of shaping the beliefs, notions and attitudes consumers harbour concerning a brand. This involves developing a series of long-term strategies and executing a series of creative campaigns to cement a unique brand image.
Call to Action (CTA)
A statement in the text, audio, or video that directs the consumer to take a specific action such as learn more, sign up, swipe up, buy now, etc.
Classified advertising
This refers to geographically specific ads that appear in newspapers, news blogs, local magazines, and on classified websites like Craigslist.
Click-through rate
The click-through rate is the number of times your ads were clicked divided by the number of impressions i.e. number of times your ad was shown to the user.
If your ad was clicked 7 times and you had 100 impressions, that makes your click-through rate 7%. The average CTR is 2% but you should always strive to increase the rate since that greatly affects conversions.
Click-Throughs
Click-Through is the number of clicks on a link in a post within a social media channel.
Contact form
A contact form contains different fields for the user to fill in different information such as name, address, message, and required demographic data.
Content marketing
Content marketing is the process of developing and promoting content that does not explicitly promote the brand, rather it provides the basis for which audiences can interact with the brand, building trust organically.
It mostly involves providing informational, educational, and entertaining material that gives the brand on top of mind awareness and retains existing customers.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of users whose actions lead to a conversion. It’s calculated by dividing total conversions by total traffic within a given period.
Copywriting vs Content writing
The difference between the two is the intention behind why the piece of content was written. Copywriting is any form of content written to explicitly promote a brand during an immediate campaign to attract direct customers.
On the other hand, Content writing involves is written to persuade the buyer’s interest long term, which indirectly influences sales. The tone of voice used in content-writing is less invasive and more subtle than in copywriting.
Content Rate
Your content rate is the number of content pieces you produce at a particular period. Such content includes presentations, blog posts, infographics, videos, etc.
Conversion rate
This is the rate at which customers took the desired action after a marketing campaign was run in a set period of time, eg. signups, website clicks, e-book downloads, subscriptions, etc.
It is calculated as the number of conversions divided by the total number of interactions on your landing page or website during the period of which the campaign was run. That number is multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.
Conversions
Conversions measure the number of conversions within a given period. A conversion is a final action you want a user to take on your site. It could be to purchase a product or service or subscribe to a newsletter.
CPA
CPA is the abbreviation for Cost Per Action or Cost Per Acquisition. It is the dollar equivalent of what a brand pays to gain a lead.
CPC
CPC means Cost per Click—for paid social media advertising or search.
Business to Consumer (B2B) marketing
This refers to Business to Consumer transactions. In B2B marketing, a business markets a product or a service to the final consumers. E-commerce stores are an example of B2C marketing.
Conversion rate optimization
It is the process of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website or social media page, like using strong CTAs, having fewer form fields, etc.
Cost per acquisition
This metric measures the cost of acquiring one paying customer on a digital campaign. It is measured by dividing the total cost spent on a specific ad campaign by the number of customers acquired from the same campaign.
Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
This is the cost a digital executive or advertiser pays per one thousand impressions on a social media campaign. It is a measure of the number of people (usually thousands of people) that might have come across your ad.
Creatives
This refers to content that is developed for a brand’s promotional purposes. It can either be promoted organically or paid for in search ads or social media ads.
Customer Lifetime Value
A customer lifetime value is an estimate of the net profit that could accrue to your brand in the future from a customer.
Customer Satisfaction
It’s the measure of how goods and services offered by your brand meet or exceed your customers’ expectations.
Customer Satisfaction Rate
Customer satisfaction rate is the percentage score between 0% and 100% that defines how pleased a customer is with a brand. As expected, 100% stands for absolute customer satisfaction.
Customer Turnover Rate
Customer turnover rate is the measure of how many customers leave in a given period.
Culture marketing
This kind of marketing is built around infusing specific nuances or elements of a particular culture or demographics into your overall marketing strategy. Culture marketing is a method of appealing to a set of your audience uniquely so that communications don’t sound generic, ergo ineffective.
Customer Retention Rate
Customer retention rate is the percentage of all retained customers with respect to those that couldn’t be retained.
Earned Media
This kind of content earns brand publicity through organic methods rather than paid media. Types of earned media are customer reviews, social media mentions, UGC content.
Engagement
This refers to the interactions of consumers with your branded content on social media eg. likes, shares, saves, etc.
Ephemeral content
This is any video, audio, images or GIF that is accessible to users for only a short period. It usually lasts for 24 hours before disappearing from social networking sites. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp support ephemeral content via stories, live content, and highlights. Ephemeral content is interactive, scannable, showcase user-generated content, and is shareable.
Ever-green content
Contrary to a popular misconception, ever-green content is not the opposite of ephemeral content. Evergreen content is content that is always relevant to users and never goes out of date. It focuses on topics that users are always curious, searching about. This makes it void of an expiration date. While a lot of content remains on the internet without necessarily disappearing, it doesn’t make them evergreen. Evergreen content requires little alterations during updates to stay useful to customers. This makes it a perfect bait for directing customers to websites or external sites from your social media pages.
Exits
This refers to the number of people that leave a social media highlight or story. It is measured when a user doesn’t continue to another piece of content but quits it all together. Exits are an indicator that content is not engaging, interactive, or you have too many posts lined up in succession so the user ends up tired of flipping through.
Fans or Followers
Fans are the total number of people on your platforms per period.
Hashtags
These are short phrases or words preceded by a hash sign (#) used for promoting unique keywords and identifying content on specific topics on social media. Hashtags are used to run campaigns, contests and increase social media engagement when used correctly.
Impressions
An online impression is the total number of times your content is displayed on whatever platform that is placed on, regardless of whether people see it or not.
Influence Score
Influence scores are used to measure how much influence an individual or brand commands on a particular social media platform. They can be awarded by Klout, Kred, or other similar providers.
Keyword Frequency
Keyword Frequency is the number of times a given phrase or keyword appears on a brand’s social media content.
K-Factor
K-Factor is the growth rate of your customer base, application, or website.
Leads
Leads are the number of prospective customers that have shown unique interests in your brand. Field forms are used to generate leads that are nurtured until conversion.
Marketing Insights
This is relevant, actionable data about a target audience, customer segment, or industry, enabling brands to make better-informed decisions based on data discovered.
Native Ads
Native ads are a type of advertising that matches the form of the platform it is placed on. TikTok brand takeovers are native ads as the ads fit into the platforms’ video short-form video format.
New Visitor Conversions
New visitor conversion is the number of conversions that happened within a period from new visitors to the brand’s website.
Organic Promotion
Organic promotion or marketing refers to a gradual process of customers discovering and interacting with a brand’s service offerings and products over time due to relevant, engaging, shareable content, as opposed to discovery through boosted or paid advertising.
Owned Media
This refers to any form of online content that is created, developed, curated and controlled by a brand. Online properties such as blogs, video channels, photo libraries, online magazines, etc. Owned media increases a brand’s digital footprint, in so doing increases the possibility of being discovered by new audiences and creates opportunities for brand building among existing customers.
Paid Media
This refers to content created to be promoted via paid platforms such as Facebook, Instagram ads, YouTube ads and others. It appears in various formats on social media (user feeds, stories, in-app messaging) and is presented to users where they most likely will be found.
Paid promotion
Paid promotion is used to market a brand’s assets via paid platforms.
Pay-per-click (PPC)
This is an online advertising model in which a digital executive manager or brand manager pays for an ad placement each time a user clicks on it.
When a user clicks on the ad, it indicates interest on their part. Whether or not the user takes a deserted action from the CTA, there will still be a charge.
The rate varies from one advertising platform to the other, based on placement, bidding methods, formats and projected reach.
Post Rate
Post rate is the number of social media posts within a given period. This may include Instagram posts per period, Tweets per period, LinkedIn posts per period, Facebook posts per period, etc.
Post Reach
It’s an estimate of the number of people who see a particular piece of content at least once in a given period.
Post Topic Mix
It’s the percentage of posts on each social media channel per period, analyzed by content topic, e.g., promotions, blog posts, resources, etc.
Post Type Mix
Post type mix is the percentage of posts on each social media platform per period, analyzed by type, e.g., link, text, image, video, etc.
Potential Impressions
It represents the number of times a content piece could be displayed, not considering whether or not it is engaged by people during a given period.
Potential Reach
Potential reach is the potential number of people in your brand’s audience—together with their friends and other members of a social media community—that could see a piece of your content within a given period.
Rank Per Keyword
Rank per keyword is the average position of your content on a search engine among search results for a particular keyword or phrase.
Response Rate
Response rate is the percentage of comments, questions, or problems from people concerning your brand that you respond to in a given period.
Return Visitor Conversions
Return visitor conversion is the number of conversions per period from visitors returning to your brand’s website.
RPC (Revenue Per Click)
RPC is the average amount generated in revenue per click with paid advertising.
ROI (Return On Investment)
ROI is the amount generated from social media efforts divided by the total social media expenses.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the science and art of getting a brand’s content to rank higher when a user makes a search with specific keywords.
SEO enables pages and content to be easily discovered by new users on social media platforms using a bundle of methods such as hashtags, keyword-optimized bios, etc.
SEO on social media goes a long way to positively influence ranking on websites as well.
Sentiment
Sentiment is the percentage of total brand mentions that are positive, indifferent, and/or negative.
Share of Audience
It’s the estimated percentage of people a brand will reach when compared to its rivals.
Share of Engagement
A brand’s share of engagement is the way its engagement stats compare to others within the same field.
Share of Voice
A brand’s share of Voice is how it measures up in conversation when compared to related brands
Shareable Content
This refers to any video, image, GIF, story, highlight, blog, that is engaging enough to encourage people to share across their social circles.
User-generated Content (UGC)
This is content that is created by users posted online which usually involves a brand. And it can have branded assets such as branded/exclusive hashtags, branded filters, and so on.
Social Media Marketing Budget
A social media marketing budget is the amount of money your marketing team spends per reporting period.
Social Media Conversion Rate
Social media conversion rate is the percentage of total social media-attributed conversions you get by dividing the sum of social media conversions by total conversions.
Traffic
It’s the number of social media-driven visits or visitors to your site per period.
Traffic Ratio
Traffic ratio is the percentage of traffic from each of the main types of visitors—direct, referral, and search visitors.
Video Views
Video views mean the number of views a piece of video content gets on Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
Viral Content
Viral content is any online material or content that spreads rapidly online through shares by multiple users. The initial stage of virility can either kick off organically or be boosted by paid promotion. What makes content viral is its ability to spur multiple interests and interactions by various circles of friends.
It runs on the dominos effect principle, where one domino affects another, and it goes on and on, ending only when dominoes are maxed out.
Virality
Virality is the rate at which your brand’s piece of content circulates across social media. It can be measured by the total number of shares per content piece.
Visibility
Online visibility is a brands’ overall discoverable social media presence in showcasing its products or services.
Visibility can vary depending on various factors such as the paid, owned, earned media, and branded assets available for user interaction.
