Anyone who's entering the social media domain needs to understand that there are a few key social media marketing terms to know. While the list below is an excellent start, it is by no means a comprehensive list. Yet when you get a thorough understanding of this as you read on, you'll be able to start seeing better results with your social media campaigns.
This guide is designed as a practical reference. Think of it as social media terminology for beginners and experienced marketers alike.
Social Media Terms, Explained
Standard Social Media Terms
Analytics
Here, we're looking at all the data points we receive from our posts and analyzing these datasets to help focus future campaigns. Analytics will provide demographic and regional information and begin to shape what a target audience might look like.
Blog
The core content that's being created is going to be written content that goes into blogs. This is shortened from weblogs. It has since expanded into videos and, at times, can be referenced as vlogs. This is what will be a key component in driving organic traffic to your site.
Hashtag
These are the words that follow the hashtag (#) symbol. These are critical in social media posts as this is what the systematic algorithm picks up and helps promote throughout the social media sea.
CTA (Call to Action)
A CTA is the specific action you want a user to take after seeing your content. That might be clicking a link, signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or downloading a resource. Every piece of campaign content should have a clear CTA. Without one, even strong content can fail to drive measurable results.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics tell you how your audience is responding to your content. These are some of the most important common social media campaign terms to understand, because platforms use engagement signals to determine how widely they distribute your posts.
Impressions
This is one of the first metrics you'll end up encountering.. This is how many people have viewed your post. It doesn't gauge how many people take action, click on the post, or even engage with it; it's just how many people have put their eyes on it. This can help show your social media reach, which can be compounded when your content is shared with others, as that viewership will also count towards your impressions.
Reach
Reach measures how many unique users saw your content. If one person sees your post three times, that counts as one reach and three impressions. Reach gives you a clearer picture of how many individual people your content is actually getting in front of.
Engagement
This is another metric that's being tracked more and more. It's not just about paid promotional advertising, but also about every post on social media. How many users actively engage with the content, including liking it, commenting on it, or sharing the post with others? This helps to show the overall community engagement you have on social media compared to the actual followers or subscribers you may have.
Performance and Conversion Metrics
These social media marketing terms move beyond visibility and into results.
Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
This is calculated by the number of users who see your social media post versus how many click on that post only. This is a core metric to measure to see how much activity your posts on social media are bringing in.
Conversion Rate
This is like a click-through rate, but it takes action a step further. This is to see the number of users who see a social media post or advertisement, click on it, and complete the call to action or CTA. This CTA can be a purchase made, a registration completed, or even just downloading more information from the site.
KPI (Key Performance Indicator)
These are your overall tracking metrics for your marketing and business goals. KPI is known as Key Performance Indicators and is a rolling metric that is consistently updated with fresh data. This can track your different metrics, such as clickthrough rate, conversion rate, levels of engagement, and other actions.
It can also sync up these data points with call-to-action metrics, especially related to registration and sales. You can have different KPIs for different campaigns or one overall set of KPIs to hit as a company. If you're not sure your current strategy is hitting those targets, it may be time to revisit the metrics you're tracking.
Paid Advertising Terms
Running paid campaigns introduces its own vocabulary. These are the key social media terms for marketers managing ad budgets and sponsored content.
A/B Testing
This testing measures two (or more) social media posts at the same time. The aim is to see which one performed and why. The differences are minimal, with either different colors/fonts being used or separate calls to action.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
When it comes to paid search, pay-per-click (PPC) comes up often. This is the rate that the advertiser will pay every time their sponsored social media post is clicked on.
This doesn't mean that there's any other action necessary, but to be clicked on, and for that, there is a subsequent small charge. Therefore, it's important to budget this appropriately and measure the clickthrough and conversion rates to ensure your SMM panel services and ad spend are worthwhile.
Targeting
As you start to understand the target audience for your brand, you'll want to focus your social media advertising in those areas only as a way to focus the campaign, conserve funds, and ultimately improve both your ROI and KPIs.
Campaign Strategy and ROI Terms
These terms cover the big-picture outcomes every campaign is ultimately measured against.
ROI (Return on Investment)
This acronym represents the Return on Investment and is meant to track how successful your campaigns are versus the number of funds put into the campaign for advertising and content creation. You want to ensure that your ROI at the end is positive and that your campaigns and advertisements are leading to revenues, even if it's not always the easiest to track.
Viral
This is where your social media posting blows up on the social media channels without the intention to do so. This is where the impressions, reposts, and conversion rates all surpass the intended initial target and beat out all expectations. This snowball effect usually occurs without spending any extra funds, making it one of the most sought-after possibilities in social media marketing.
Organic vs. Paid
Organic social media refers to any content you post without paying to promote it. Paid social media includes sponsored posts, boosted content, and ads distributed to a targeted audience. Most effective strategies use a combination of both organic content, which builds community and credibility, and paid campaigns to extend your reach and accelerate specific goals.
Put These Social Media Marketing Terms to Work
These are some of the core social media terms to focus on throughout your social media marketing journey. They help to let you know the health of your social media platform and how engaged your users are with how helpful your marketing campaigns have been.
If you're ready to take your social media growth to the next level, reach out to The Social Media Growth to see how our services can help you build momentum, increase engagement, and hit the numbers that matter for your brand.
