The world of social media marketing terms and jargon can’t be quite overwhelming. Moreover, its rapidly changing nature makes keeping up quite challenging. This ultimate social media definition dictionary will help you discover what’s new on social media and keep you updated easily.

We write tips for social media marketing, the latest social media news, and the trends that’ll help you succeed on social media. 

This is a living document that we are updating regularly by adding new terms and definitions.

Social media terms

A

A/B test — is a research methodology that tests a subject’s response to variant A against variant B. Also known as the split test, gathers both qualitative and quantitative users’ insights to understand their behavior. It then determines which of the two options brings the maximum impact and drives business metrics. 

Ads Manager — is a Facebook tool that allows users to set up a social media ad campaign and then view, modify, and see the results of advertisements in one place. The ad campaign command center also helps to manage targeting, budgeting, and optimization processes. Learn more:  How to Use Facebook Ads for Beginners

Algorithm — can be defined as technical means of ordering posts based on relevancy instead of publishing time. A set of computing formulas identifies which content a user wants to see first according to the likelihood of engaging with such content. Facebook and Instagram algorithms examine what content users have engaged with the most in their previous social media activity, and based on that; it offers similar content. 

Analytics — is a process that includes the use of technologies to monitor, interpret and find meaning in social data gathered from social media channels. Analytics derives valuable customer and behavioral insights that help to create a social media business strategy. Check the best paid and free tools for social media analytics.

Audience — is a group of people on social media who can interact with someone’s content and page. They are the people who are likely united by some common characteristics, such as demographics, interests, and behaviors.

Augmented reality (AR) — is an emerging technology that combines computer-generated objects such as lenses, filters, and effects with the natural world around them. AR is an essential instrument for branding, entertainment, and e-commerce. For example, AR can offer a virtual try-on experience typically only available in-store. 

Avatar — is a basic profile image or picture that identifies a person or a brand on social media platforms.

Average Handling Time (AHT) — is a metric that figures out the average time that takes an individual or a company to resolve an issue of a customer on social media. It usually covers hold time, talk time, and other related actions during the conversation. The metric applies to establish benchmarks or new customer service goals.

Average Response Time (ART) —  is the average time that takes an individual or a company to reply to all requests and issues of customers on social media. Measuring response time is an efficient way to assess customer service performance. More specifically, the metric provides valuable insights into areas of finance, logistics, and brand reputation. 

AMA — is the abbreviation for ‘ask me anything. 

Application Programming Interface (API) — is a software intermediary that allows two applications to interact with each other. More specifically, API offers a service to other systems of software by connecting between computers or between computer programs. For example, a brand can use Instagram’s API to schedule posts. Learn more about API, especially social media APIs: Social Media APIs and Best Use Cases.

🤗 Bonus: Discover Sociality.io social media management API

B

B/C — is the short form of ‘because’ on social media platforms.

B2B social media marketing— stands for ‘Business-to-Business’ and, in its most basic form, refers to social media marketing products or services to other businesses as opposed to business-to-consumer companies. In essence, B2B social media marketing crafts the development of brand identity and awareness, keeping an eye on data and trends, creating educational and informative content, and identifying targeted platforms and audiences.

B2C — stands for the term ‘Business-to-Consumer’ and refers to companies that take operations with their consumers in order to drive traffic, sales, and popularity. B2C is strategically oriented toward consumers and appears to be the process in which a company delivers products or services directly to the end-users. 

Bitly — is a free URL shortening service that provides statistics for the performance of the links. 

Bitmoji —  is a customizable avatar that users can create in the likeness of their faces. Bitmojis can be added to keyboards and used as profile pictures.

Block — is the action of preventing interactions with a particular user on social media. Blocking restricts unwanted users to someone’s page. 

Blogger — is a person who keeps a blog in a specific field and updates it regularly on social media.

BoardReader — is a free listening search engine that aggregates data from multiple social media sources and searches for keywords. Typically BoardReader is an advanced application that crawls messages and discussion boards to see what people are saying about a person or a brand. The configuration parameters for this crawler are designed to identify business reputation effortlessly. 

Bot — appears to be a fake user on social media that’s run by an algorithm. Bots are designed to perform specific actions that help build a large audience. Bots follow, like, and comment automatically. Discover how to clean Instagram account from bots. 

Bookmark — is a feature provided by many social media platforms to save posts or profiles to a private virtual library. Thus, the users will easily find them later. 

Boosted Posts — are promoted posts that target a specific audience and are considered the easiest option for Facebook advertising. Boosted can be paid and enabled straight from the app. Unlike Facebook ads, promoted posts are relatively inexpensive but don’t have all of the same customization features. Learn why boosting Facebook and Instagram posts is bad. 

Brand Advocate — also called a brand ambassador, appears to be a person employed by an organization or company that represents a brand in a positive light. The person expresses a genuine affirmative opinion on social media, which helps increase brand awareness, elevate reputation, and impact sales.

Brand Awareness — is the degree of familiarity of consumers with a company on social media. In essence, brand awareness measures how recognizable a brand is to its target audience. The social media marketing strategies include the development of an associative network memory model. That leads consumers to adopt an instinctive preference towards a brand.

Business Manager — Facebook business manager is an advanced command center/hub that enables a user to scale business presence in the social media environment and where all the Facebook and Instagram business assets live. It allows users to broadly manage multiple Facebook and Instagram business pages, business possessions, and ads management. Also, it provides the ability to grant full or partial access to other team members to accomplish their digital marketing efforts. 

C

Caption — is a brief explanation that accompanies a post on social media. Captions aim to elaborate posts in order to engage with users or prompt reactions. Article: How to write good Instagram captions?

Carousel — refers to the type of posts on Instagram and Facebook that contains multiple photos and/or videos that the user can scroll through. Brands can effectively use carousel posts for advertising purposes. It offers an opportunity for the advertiser to embed several links into carousel items that lead to different landing pages within one post. 

Cashtag — is a twitter reference, like the hashtag, searches for content that appears as the dollar sign ($), mainly related to a particular company’s stock.

Chat — is an online conversation happening in instant messaging applications.

Chatbot — is an artificial intelligence program that automates customers’ interaction inside messengers. Chatbot generates data, occurs lead collection, and provides shopping recommendations, and more. Learn how to create a no-code Facebook chatbot. 

Check-in — is a geographical location tagging in a social media post. Check-ins indicate where the user is or where the content was created. Users can check in from any location, such as parks, bars, museums, restaurants, or libraries. Typically users apply check-ins to point out that they have physically visited a venue or event.

Chronological Feed — is a social media term used to describe newsfeed format that arranges content by order of occurrence in time. Although many social media platforms do not display first the latest published content, Twitter, for instance, still operates on a chronological feed.

Clickbait — is manipulative content or headline that convinces users to click on it. Usually, clickbait is misleading and exaggerating (dis)information that pushes people into clicking.

Clickthrough rate (CTR — is a social media metric calculating the percentage of people who click on the page or given ad. The measurement is commonly used to evaluate the success and the effectiveness of an online advertising campaign. 

Comment — is a text-based reaction to content on social media networks.

Command Center — is a social media data center, also called “social war rooms,” that monitors business insights and its online reputation. It also engages with customers to optimize a marketing strategy.

Community manager — is a social media professional in charge of building effective relationships between a business and a group of social media users who form a community under the brand’s name. The community manager guides online communications and appears to be an integral part of practical customer experience. Learn how to automate routine community managers’ activities. 

Connections — the term comes from LinkedIn and refers to the professionals who connect with other people for business purposes. The number of connections (people) reflects in the user’s profile.

Conversion Rate (CVR) — is a metric that refers to the percentage of people who completed an intended online action. For example, customers who have maintained a goal such as online purchase, filling out a form, or downloading an item, considered as converted once they have finished the process. 

Cost per Click (CPC) — also known as post per click (PPC) is an online advertising revenue model, which implies the actual price an advertiser pays a publisher for each click on the ad. Advertisers commonly use this metric to set a daily budget for a campaign. For example, a business page on a social network with a CPC of 10 cents would bill the advertiser $100 per 1,000 clicks. The ad is automatically removed from the publishing source once the advertiser’s budget has reached its limits.

Cost per mille (CPM ) —  is another social advertising metric, also called cost per thousand. It is the cost a person pays for one thousand views or impressions of an advertisement. If a business sets an ad goal to reach as many views as possible and spread brand awareness, CPM is a convenient measurement to calculate the campaign. 

Crisis management — is an operation that requires social media managers to prevent pr crisis to a company’s reputation from negative events or interactions with a brand. 

Cross-channel marketing — is a social media strategy that involves managing a brand’s exposure across all its channels. Also known as omnichannel marketing, it aims to provide customers with an integrated and consistent experience. 

Crowdsourcing — is a term that refers to an act of digital activity aimed at finding ideas, know-how, or funding in relation to content. Thus crowdsourcing presents the initiative to create a project, campaign, or charity that requires a public commitment.  

D

Dark social — is a term used by marketers and search engine optimization (SEO) specialists to describe unknown web results that are hard to check due to the absence of a tracking code. For instance, “invisible” media link-shares from messengers and email are categorized as dark social because they do not comprise any digital referral information about the source. Thus, marketers can not identify the origin of the traffic. 

Dark Post — refers to Facebook ads that appear in the newsfeeds of only a selected group of users and only the targeted audience ever sees them. The dark posts allow an advertiser to target particular users by applying keywords, which access specific and personal information. Thus, an advertiser can send ads tailored to narrowly selected groups, such as IT professionals who watch filmmaking tutorials while practicing vegan cooking. 

Disappearing Content — also known as ephemeral content refers to social media posts that don’t last more than 24 hours. Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, and Snaps are time-sensitive and appeared to be examples of disappearing content.

DM — stands for “direct message” and allows sending or getting messages privately in a personal inbox provided by a social media app.

Doxing — is the act of publicly revealing personal information about an individual or organization. The act often happens on social media platforms and usually includes such intentions as online shaming, extortion, and threats.

​​Duets — appear to be a viral Tik Tok trend that challenges a user to record a video that follows along with another person’s video. Both videos appear single, side by side on split-screen. Thus, users communicate with each other by replying to video content with their videos. Businesses and influencers looking for awareness, use the trend actively due to its strongest form of engagement on Tik Tok. 

E

Engagement — is the process of communicating (engaging) in a social media community, which includes such online action as likes, clicks, mentions, comments, DMs, replies, shares, retweets, saves, and favorites.

Engagement rate (ER) — is a metric that tracks users’ activity and interactions with a brand’s content on social media. The metric gauges likes, reactions, and comments for an online business’ efforts. The metric is crucial in analyzing the efficiency of social media marketing campaigns. 

Evergreen Content — is content that doesn’t go out of date, as the name implies. More specifically, it refers to search-optimized content that is continually relevant and remains valid for readers/viewers over a long period of time.

F

F4F — is an acronym that stands for “follow for following”.

Feed — is the stream of content generated by social media aggregators or apps. The feed contains visual and text materials from various social media accounts.

Filter — is the computer-generated visual attachment designed to modify images to give an exaggerated, unusual, or special effect. Social media apps offer filters to entertain users and increase platforms’ usage. Regarding social media marketing, it is considered a cost-effective and fast way to earn a new audience and increase brand awareness. For example, brands can create custom-made filters that impose their products or logos. Learn how to create a custom Instagram filter for your brand. 

Follower — is a social media user who subscribes to others’ accounts in order to see their updates of certain content, ideas, interests. 

Follow Friday #ff — is a practice in which people send tweets recommending other users providing reasons and ending with hashtag #ff on Twitter.

FOMO — is an acronym for “fear of missing out” which describes the feeling of anxiety about missing out on events that are interesting or enjoyable and they want to be part of especially on social media.

Frequency — refers to how many times an ad has reached the same person with a specific piece of content on social media. Many brands track ads frequency because the amount of times a user sees content will affect how they feel about it. The over-display of an ad might become annoyed for viewers and negatively impact the business’ image and budget. However, low frequency doesn’t yield high conversion rates. 

Friend — is the term used inside Facebook. Facebook users add each other as friends so they may see each other’s profiles and news feeds.

FYP — is an acronym, standing for ‘For You Page.’ TikTok users mark their videos with #FYP to prioritize their content on other users’ “You Page” feed. This feed acts as a separate landing page for users to showcase selected videos that the TikTok algorithm suggests to watch.

G

Geofilter — is a location-based image filter that can only be accessed within a specific area. Also known as a geotag or geosticker, and can be added as a graphic overlay to a photo or video in social media apps including Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Geotargeting — is a form of advertising that uses location data to reach potential customers. This advertising technology retrieves data of users’ behavior and thus automates appropriate messages for them. 

GIF — is a series of soundless video and animated images that are mostly used to react without words as an alternative to emoji. Learn how to create and upload branded GIFs to Instagram Stories.

H

Hashtag (#) —  is a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign (#), used on social media networks to identify content on a specific topic. Hashtags gather all the content tagged on the same subject to make the content more discoverable.

✨ You may be interested in: Debunking 6 Instagram hashtags myths social media marketers follow

Handle (@) — is a term that refers to someone’s unique username. A handle follows an @ symbol, such as @sociality.io, to identify users and communicate with them.

Header Image — is the main picture displayed on a social media profile. Also known as a cover image, it allows people to recognize a person, brand, or organization. This is usually where the logo appears, along with main navigation and other auxiliary information. 

I

Impression — is a metric that refers to the number of times the content has been seen in users’ feeds. The metric is crucial because it shows how many people have seen a post, even if they didn’t engage with it by clicking or commenting etc. Thus, impressions allow businesses to track the performance of their ads on a moment-to-moment basis. Discover the difference between impressions and reach. 

Influencer —  is a person who has a large audience on social media accounts. Influencers leverage their social media assets to influence people’s opinions or persuade them to buy certain products or services. Learn more: How to find social media influencers for your brand?

Instant Messaging (IM) — refers to instant messaging technology, which offers real-time chatting and transferring files. Most massaging apps facilitate connections with this feature, allowing two or more users to talk synchronously in real-time.

Insight —  refers to valuable information extracted from social media data using intelligent analytics tools. Measuring insights helps businesses to understand the success of their social media strategies. 

K

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) — is a quantifiable measurement used to assess the prosperity of a business and its performance over a certain time, see if objectives are being met, and figure out what changes need to be done. KPIs also apply to determine if a business’s social media marketing strategy is effective.

L

Like — is an expression used to define the click on a post as a sign of approval of the content or show support on social media.

Live Streaming — is a way of broadcasting over the internet, aiming to reach an audience in real-time on social media. The purpose of a social stream is to verbally advertise a brand or service, engage a target audience, run a specific live conversation or interview. 

M

Mention — refers to the act of tagging a user in a social media message or any other type of engagement to trigger attention for that user. For example, mentions applying when a user on social media talks about someone’s company, brand, or product. 

Meme — refers to specific images, videos, and texts, typically humorous in nature and with great potential to be widely shared across social media channels. It also carries a symbolic meaning that represents a particular social phenomenon or theme. Thus, many brands that chase online attention and awareness often approach memes in their social media marketing strategy. 

Metric — is a statistic that indicates the success of someone’s social media performance. In essence, it is the data used to evaluate the impact of social media marketing on a company’s revenue and success in general. Metrics are also important because they provide a clue to how a business can modify its marketing strategy.

Modified Tweet (MT) — is a tweet that is changed or shortened from someone’s original tweet.

N

Native advertising — is a type of social media advertising that adheres to a standard post format. The purpose of native advertising is to make ads look and feel less like ads. The profound native idea refers to the coherence of the ad content with the other media that regularly appear on the platform. A boosted post appears to be an example of native advertising. 

Newsjacking — is the practice of aligning a brand with the latest big events or news in an attempt to promote or advertise a product or brand. The key aspect of the tactic pledges to instantaneously reach a wider audience.

Newsfeed — is a list of newly published content on social media networks by which users explore and discover new media pieces posted by others. Newsfeed highlights information that includes common users’ content, business content, profile changes, upcoming events, advertisements, and other updates. 

Notification —  is a message or an alert to inform a user about a social media update. For example, social media apps alert if a user receives a new message, like, or subscription approval to another user’s page. 

O

Organic Reach — refers to the number of users who have seen someone’s content and that person has not paid promotion on social media. With the increasing overflow of content published in newsfeeds, Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms now prioritize organic reach. Thus the social media strategies currently focus on genuinely creative and interesting content. 

Objectives — are the particular, measurable results that businesses aim to achieve or maintain within the company’s growth. Setting business objectives is one of the fundamental aspects of planning and creating a business strategy for future functioning. 

Also, social media objectives refer to the online advertisement and imply a series of assertions that determine the media plan or campaign. For instance, in Facebook Ads Manager, an advertiser can set specific objectives for the ad to encourage people to visit his/her website.

P

Paid Reach — refers to the number of users who have seen the paid social media content in their newsfeed. Amplifying brand content with paid reach presents an opportunity to extend total reach significantly. Also, paid reach carries a social context that endows every paid content with the same social support as organic reach.

Pin — refers to the photo, video, link, or image displayed on a bookmarking platform Pinterest that is made up of various pins. Typically, users create a Pinterest board on any topic, such as “Wishlist” or “Interior designs.” Then, users can either upload photos or videos from a computer or add a pin from any website by clicking on the “Pin It” button.

Pinner — is someone who saves, or pins, a page or image on a Pinterest Board from various internet sources. However, there are two pinner sub-typologies that evolved: people who pin for personal use and do not acknowledge that their Pinterest boards are publicly available. And fillers that are not averse to sharing their pins with others.

Post — is digital content that implies meaning or a message that a user submits to a social media platform. The content can then be displayed via the Software, App, or Approved Hardware. Posts can be in any digital format, such as text, images, videos, and links to other content.

Private account — refers to the user’s ability to change settings by making the account private. This means that only subscribers approved by the user can see his/her profile and posts. This also means that users’ posts won’t appear in a stranger’s newsfeed, search box, hashtags, or location page.

Protected Account — refers to Twitter private accounts that don’t allow non-followers to see someone’s tweets unless the user doesn’t approve their request to follow. 

Q

Quote Tweet — is a retweet provided along with another user’s comment. A Quote Tweet allows adding users’ opinions to the retweet while keeping the original post-exposure. Thus it’s a way to share other people’s content, support them and apply new thoughts to someone’s message. 

R

Reach — is a social media metric that refers to the number of unique people who have come across a particular content on social platforms. The metric maintains specific kinds of data showing how users see and interact with content. Reach data evaluates such performances as campaigns success, the number of active followers, the impact of partnerships with influencers and collaborations, online reach beyond social media, and more. 

Reactions — refers to an audience responding to a brand’s messages and actions. Many social media platforms have an emoji button that indicates such reactions as love, laugh, wow, sad, and angry emotions. And brands should monitor their audience’s reactions to see whether they publish content effectively and maintain engagement objectives. Also, brands should encourage positive reactions to build strong connections with their followers because reactions lead to successful social media performance. 

Regram — is a third-party re-sharing tool that allows users to repost someone’s post onto their Instagram feed story. The tool became popular for its users due to a strict Instagram copyright policy and the absence of a built-in-app “Re-Share” button. 

Reels — is an Instagram feature that allows creating engaging, fun, and short videos using a variety of music and the catalog with user-generated reels media. Users can edit 15-second multi-clip videos with music, effects, and other creative tools. 

Relevance score — is a 1-10 scale calculated based on the positive and negative feedback an ad receives from its target audience. It provides a general idea of how the targeted users perceive the ad. The relevance score then determines the position and the reach of the ad on a search engine. Thus, ads are listed in descending order based on the result of that evaluation.

Retargeting — is a social media advertising tactic that targets someone again. It allows marketers to show certain products to users who previously interacted with a brand’s page or intended to buy those goods.  The information about non-converted users is collected in cookies and then used for targeting through ads on social networks and other websites.

Repin — is a post on Pinterest that is saved to one or more of the user’s pinboards. The repin incorporates the image, title, and link to the original source. The marketing strategies on Pinterest include tracking repins to benchmark engagement and shareability of a brand’s content. 

Repost — refers to the act of sharing another user’s content on social media. The reposting incorporation into a social media marketing strategy presupposes high engagement and reach. 

Request — is a notification that means a user wants to view or follow a private account.

Retweet (RT) — refers to Twitter and appears to be an act of reposting someone’s content to another user’s page. Retweeting usually aims to reach a larger audience or emphasize solidarity with someone else’s opinion expressed in that tweet.

RSS feed — is an acronym that stands for Really Simple Syndication. Appears to be a web feed format that allows content publishers to syndicate multiple media pieces in one place. Thus, it enables users to subscribe to the content and receive updates when the site adds new content.

RSS reader — is an efficient information consumption aggregator that allows users to receive articles from multiple websites into one place using RSS feeds. The purpose of an RSS reader is to provide personalized content with the ability to curate it. 

S

Share — refers to an act of spreading content to users’ connections, groups, or specific individuals on social media platforms.

Shareable content — is content that people find valuable, so they spread it further. Thoughts, tips, or information expressed in the content have the potential to be transmitted. However, the shareability of the content depends on its quality or ability to contribute to people’s interests or solve their problems. 

Share of Voice (SOV) — is a metric that provides information about a brand’s presence on social media compared to competitors from the same industry. Also, the share of voice measures brands awareness and customer engagement. More importantly, it shows the percentage of a company’s media spending compared to the average media expenditure for a product or service in the market.

Sentiment analysis — is the computational process of identifying how people feel about a brand or issue on social media. The method includes using text analysis tools to classify positive, negative, or neutral opinions.

Social Media Analytics (SMA) — Social media analytics is assessing the collected data through social media platforms in order to determine online marketing strategies for a brand or company. Social media analytics is considered broader than common metrics and typically incorporates various reporting tools into a more comprehensive analysis.

Social media management (SMM) — is the ongoing process of analyzing multiple social media channels to develop a tailored strategy for certain businesses. The process includes such actions as creating and distributing content, scheduling, studying performance, engaging with an audience, monitoring online conversations, collaborating with influencers, etc. Also, the process often involves tools with built-in artificial intelligence that professionally automate social media management and enhance productivity. 

Social Media Listening (SML) — is an analyzing process performed by technologies to discover public thoughts about a brand, its products, or services in social media conversations. The process gathers data from various websites and social media platforms. It then analyzes metrics such as time spent on the page, content shares, comments, click-through rate, and text analytics. Thus, social listening gauges the success of the brand’s social media marketing strategy. 

Social media monitoring — is a process of crawling data similar to social listening, and it also implies the use of tools. A distinctive feature of monitoring is that it focuses on a specific company, brand, product, or campaign, while social listening covers brand mentions, as well as entire categories, cases, or conditions of industries.

Social Media Return of Investment (ROI) — is a metric that calculates the amount of value received from investments in social media marketing. ROI typically refers to finance deals. However, it might be quantified by non-monetary metrics if the direct impact on revenue is difficult to assess.

Social Relationship Platform (SRP) — is an effective service that listens, monitors, responds, reports, and tracks in one platform. Sociality.io is one of the best examples of all-in-one social media management platforms.

Spam — mainly refers to irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the internet, usually to a large number of users. Spams typically carry purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading virus, etc.

T

Tag — tagging means letting someone use a social handle or username of a person or business in someone else’s post. Tags provide viewers with a hyperlink to the tagged profile if they wish to interact with those individuals, businesses, or any other social media entity. Tagging on most social media platforms notifies the recipient.

Targeting — is a term that refers to digital marketing and appears to be a technological ability that displays adverts and posts to specific audiences selected by the advertiser. Brands target their paid posts based on demographics, consumer interests, and behavior. Targeting also allows combining various social factors to make the ad’s message utmost relevant and narrowly tailored to the chosen audience. For example, an advertiser can showcase his eco-beauty products to “vegan women, who follow environmentalists pages and cruelty-free cosmetics’ brands”. 

TBT — is an abbreviation that stands for Throwback Thursday. It is a popular social media trend that assumes users share old pictures of themselves or things on Thursdays. The “TBT” posts are accompanied by the hashtag #TBT or #ThrowbackThursday. Businesses approach “TBT” actively while running nostalgia-based social media marketing campaigns. By doing so, they aspire to impact the emotional connection between a brand and its audience. 

Trending Topic — refers to the most popular topics discussed on social media for a limited duration of time. Businesses monitor such trends to identify what’s holding consumers’ interests. Then, they try to adopt such talks in their social media marketing strategies to capitalize on the hype. 

Troll — is a term used to describe social media users who intentionally try to provoke and disrupt a certain person or online community. The presence of trolling behavior on a business page can negatively affect its reputation. Thus brands should avoid eliciting an angry response to trolls’ offensive comments and either ignore or report them. 

Thread — is a series of replies or comments that follow up an initial message or post. The thread appears to be a popular trend on Twitter. Its common instance is when a user posts an original message and then writes multiple replies to that primary tweet. Typically Twitter users approach this thread to share an extended stream of thoughts and break up parts of a story for impressive effect.

Trend-jacking — is a term used to define when digital marketers try to boost their brand awareness by optimizing their post or article with trending topics or hashtags (#). If a brand manages to interject itself into something gaining a lot of attention online, it sharply increases its social media engagement. 

Traffic — refers to the number of visitors to a website often generated from social media platforms. For example, a person clicks on a promotional Facebook post and then is sent to a brand’s website. The digital analytics of the website will count that visit as social traffic.

Tweep — is a term used as a short form of Tweet+People.

U

User-generated content (UGG) — is a term used to describe content produced in any form such as images, videos, text, and audio by social media users who aren’t affiliated with the business. Brands encourage people to create content for them to increase engagement. 

V

Vanity metrics — are statistics that, on the surface, demonstrate impressive metrics but do not reflect any meaningful business results. For example, a business page may have many followers but lack engagement and living users. Therefore, the business doesn’t benefit from its social media channels. Discover the reasons to stop measuring vanity metrics. 

Viral — is a social media phenomenon that refers to content that spreads to millions of people and reaches high-interest levels in a short time all over the internet. Read more about viral marketing.