Half of the world’s population uses Social Media. So naturally, companies that market to them must do the same. As a result, social networking is now used as a crucial component of marketing strategies by more than 90% of companies.

Anyone involved in social Media or digital marketing is familiar with the difficulty faced by acronyms and the usage of terminology.

Digital marketers generally implement processes using the tools, services, and tactics for social media networks like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Working in social media marketing today requires an in-depth understanding of social media, regardless of experience level. The social media marketing terminology and definitions are where it all starts.

Are you a social media marketer? Do you want to create a Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2023? We feel your buzzword pain. What is the next big thing in social media marketing? What are the common terms of social media? What are the top 40 social media terms you need to know?

To help you understand the social media jargon, we’ve put together a glossary of the terms most commonly used in social media marketing. These top 40 social media marketing terms are beneficial whether you’re a budding social media marketer or hoping to enhance your career.

Glossary for Social Media Terms 2023

1. A/B Testing: One of the real social media tests to determine what marketing approach works for your company’s brand or service is A/B testing, often known as split testing. It determines which of two variations on your social media postings generates the most conversions; testing compares them. This test works both for organic and paid ad posts.

2. Ads Manager: Facebook’s platform for designing, implementing, and evaluating paid advertising is called Ads Manager. Your advertising campaigns can be managed on Facebook, Instagram, or Audience Network. It also provides a wide range of options for budgeting, planning, and optimizing ads.

3. Algorithm: A mathematical system called an algorithm is used to solve issues and produce outcomes. For example, an algorithm in social media is a set of guidelines that search engines use to rank, filter, and display search results and adverts.

4. Analytics: Analytics is the process of analyzing data to identify patterns. Analytics in the context of social media refers to tracking metrics on your activity on social media and utilizing that information to enhance your social media marketing strategies.

5. Audience: Your social media audience is the community that your content can connect with. It includes everyone who follows you and views or engages with your posts in their newsfeed. Therefore, one of the best strategies to increase brand exposure is to expand your social media following.

6. Caption: An associated description of a social media photo is known as a caption. Text, hashtags, @ mentions, and emoticons can all be used in captions. Captions are a crucial component of social media photo stories to increase interaction.

7. Channel art: A big banner image called channel art is displayed at the top of a YouTube channel page. For conveying the channel’s personality, the channel art typically matches the channel’s aesthetic and brand’s style.

8. Click-through Rate(CTR): CTR reflects the proportion of users who click on your content. It is computed by dividing the number of link clicks by the number of views or post impressions. For a firm, the greater the CTR score, the better.

9. Conversion Rate: One of the key terms used in social media marketing is this. Regarding social media, the conversion rate is the proportion of users who respond to a call to action in a social media post or advertisement. Therefore, the conversion rate is one of the best measures of a company’s marketing strategy effectiveness.

10. Cost-per-click: A social media advertising metric, cost-per-click, shows you how much you typically pay for each click on your ad. The CPC might change depending on several variables, such as the audience you’re targeting, the areas you’re targeting, and how pertinent your advertisement is to that demographic.

11. Direct message(DM): A private communication sent straight to a user’s inbox on social media is known as a direct message. DMs are an alternative to publicly visible social media interactions like commenting on an image or publishing on a user’s timeline.

12. Engagement rate: A social media indicator called engagement rate shows how much engagement a piece of content receives from followers. It is calculated as the proportion of users who interacted with your content from all the people who saw it.

An example: If you received 50 engagements on an Instagram post and you have 500 followers, your engagement rate calculation is 50/500*100= 10%

13. Evergreen content: Content that is evergreen refers to information that is still applicable regardless of the day, the month, or the content marketing campaign.

14. Feed: A social media feed is a general terminology used in marketing to describe the content you stream from several social media accounts. Your brand’s material from various social media sites is displayed in a wall-like arrangement.

15. Follower: A follower is a user who has subscribed to watch your postings in terms of social media marketing. Therefore, the number of followers is a crucial indicator of how the audience interacts with a company or brand on social media.

16. Handle: The term “handle” refers to a unique public username used on social media accounts, similar to Twitter or Instagram, and denotes the username followed by the @ symbol.

17. Hashtag: A hashtag (#) is a word or phrase that links posts on social media to posts on the same topic or a hot issue. Users can use hashtags to make looking for postings connected to particular themes simpler.

18. Impressions: Impressions are the total number of times consumers’ social media feeds have shown your material. A viewer doesn’t need to interact with a post for an impression to be recorded.

19. Influencer: Social media influencers exhibit a great deal of influence over their friends’ and followers’ communities.

20. Influencer Marketing: Influencers in a certain field or niche with a large following and who substantially impact online community members’ purchasing behaviors are referred to as influencers in the context of marketing.

21. Insights: The term ‘insights’ refers to the Instagram analytics report generated considering the accounts, posts, stories, and overall impressions.

22. Key Performance Indicator: KPIs are widely used to monitor advancements in lead generation, sales conversions, and brand recognition.

23. Macro Influencer: Anyone with a million followers on one or more social media platforms is considered a macro-influencer.

24. Mention: A mention (or tag) is a means to draw attention to or give credit to another person or group by utilizing the @username of the person or group on the relevant social media site.

25. Micro-Influencer: One with between 1,000 and 1,000,000 followers on a single platform or a conglomerate of platforms is called a micro-influencer.

26. Meme: The term “meme” refers to a text, video, or image shared on social networking sites, typically for amusing reasons. Users participate in the spread of memes by making their variations and sharing them.

27.  Native Advertising: On social media, native advertising is a technique for displaying paid content to users in a way that makes it appear natural. Promoted Facebook posts, which resemble regular postings in user feeds, are an example of native ads.

28. Newsjacking: Using current events in your social media material is known as “newsjacking.” Social media managers frequently use “newsjacking” to make their content appear topical and pertinent while obtaining attention by connecting it to important hashtags and conversations surrounding the most recent news.

29. Optimization: The optimization method involves tracking material (typically a paid or sponsored ad) and changing its specifics in response to current performance. Optimization is also crucial when improvising your social media profile on any social media platform.

30. Pay-Per-Click: PPC is an advertising model where you are charged every time a person clicks on your ad in social media marketing. As it makes the most sense for advertisers to pay based on clicks when their main purpose is to increase visitors to a website or landing page, this is generally connected with a traffic objective.

31. Posts: Social media posts are the various feeds intended and created for the viewers to consume. These posts could be static images or videos as well.

32. Share: The term “share” describes how frequently a material is reposted on social media. For example, you can republish other users’ material on social media networks to your timeline or newsfeed by clicking the “share” button.

33. Social Listening: Social media managers use specialized software tools, such as social listening, to keep tabs on conversations surrounding important subjects, phrases, companies, and more. Software for social listening compiles mentions, remarks, hashtags, and relevant posts from across social media to offer insights into what and how individuals are discussing.

34. Story: A story is a vertical form of content or a selection of interactive content that other users can access. A story is temporary because it vanishes within 24 hours.   

35. Social Media Manager: A social media manager handles handling and carrying out significant social media operations on their social media account. A social media manager tracks any account’s analytics and overall social media presence.

36. Targeting: In social media advertising, “targeting” decides who will see your ads. Most social advertising networks let you choose which consumers should see your ads based on various criteria, including age, location, gender, interests, and more. 

37. Tag: In general, tagging is called the use of @mentions or hashtags to connect a post or comment to a specific person, group, or topic.

38. Traffic: A website’s or a mobile application’s traffic is the total number of user visits. All traffic that originates from social networks is considered social traffic. Therefore, a specific marketing goal is to increase social media traffic. It is accomplished by expanding your social media presence and encouraging users to view or interact with your content.

39. User-Generated Content: User-Generated Content (UGC) is any written, audio, video, image, or other content produced by users as contrasted to businesses. Marketers use UGC on their websites and social media platforms as a component of their social marketing strategy. Sharing UGC encourages authenticity, creates trust, and influences the buying behavior of their audience.

40. Viral: The term “viral” describes the content shared on social media and spreads rapidly. Viral content is popular tactic marketers use to promote names and goods.

“Social Media is about the people! Not about your business. Provide for the people, and the people will provide for you.”- Matt Goulart

Today, social media platforms dominate in lifting a brand’s presence, communicating the message, handling public relations, creating an e-commerce business model, and promoting content.

Understanding the social media vocabulary list is important for all social media users. In addition, we all must know the trending social media terms in 2023! We hope this article was helpful in adding to your social media vocabulary. Save, pin and share these top 40 social media marketing terms and definitions with your friends and enthusiasts. For more interesting social media blogs and articles, stay tuned!

Written by Ashay Chandekar from Socinova. Images have the copyrights of the respective sources.