Facebook Terms
Facebook Pixel: A piece of code that’s added to your ecommerce store (but not visible to users), allowing you to track how successful your social ads are performing.
Dynamic Ad: A type of Facebook ad that uses your Facebook pixel to show ads to people who have already shown interest in your business.
Facebook Ads Manager: The platform used to create and review Facebook and Instagram ads.
Facebook Business Manager: A useful tool that helps you create, publish, and monitor various business-related assets relating to a Facebook account. Provides access to the Facebook page(s), ad accounts, and product catalogs.
Boosted Post: A Facebook post with ad spend for more visibility. Can be used to target your current audience, a lookalike audience, or people with certain interests.
Conversion Ads: An ad that is specifically designed to encourage users to make a purchase or complete another value-add for a business.
Messenger: Facebook Messenger App; used as an internal email and communication application. Users can ask general questions to businesses on Messenger, and businesses can respond directly through Facebook, without the need for an outside app. Note: brands earn a rating through Messenger based on how fast they respond to clients. The better the rating, the higher the likelihood users will message a brand for a quick response.
Instagram Terms
Instagram Profile Tag: A tag is a mention of a user in a comment or in a photo. You can tag another user in a few ways. When uploading a photo, just before you hit share, you can add a user to "tag" in the photo by tapping the "tag people" bar just below the caption section of the photo. A larger version of the photo will populate, and you can then tap on the photo and enter the name of the person or business you wish to tag. If you want to tag in the caption, type the "@" symbol and then the rest of their username. Note: you need to know the username, which is not necessarily the same as the user’s name.
User-Generated Content (UGC): Content created by a user for the purpose of sharing on their own feed or being reposted by a brand on the brand’s feed. UGC often highlights a specific product or service offered by a business.
Repost: Posting user-generated content (UGC) onto your own Instagram feed. Best practice encourages tagging the original poster in the image as well as mentioning them in the comments.
Hashtag: A searchable word or string of words used to curate similar photos. Brands often use their name, i.e. #Volusion, to curate all the photos they post with said hashtag. Hashtags are a great way to expand your reach and encourage UGC. Hashtags are mainly used for Instagram, but have a small bearing on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Instagram Stories: A short video, photo, or text that displays for just 24 hours and is accessible by clicking profile photos at the top of your Instagram feed. Fun filters and effects can be added to Stories that are not available for content in your feed. Stories are a great way to give a personal look inside your brand and can be used, for example, to share intimate moments, outtakes from photo shoots, or office pranks/shenanigans. Stories are also where you can highlight new blog posts, showcase moments, or include photos not typically shared on your actual feed.
Pinterest Terms
Pin: A "pin" or "repin" is the act of saving an image to one of your Pinterest boards.
Board: A Pinterest board is a saved collection of pins, often under a shared theme. For example, you may have a board of recipes or, more specifically, a board for crock-pot recipes, a board for chicken recipes, etc.
Product Rich Pin: An expanded pin utilized by businesses to provide more information about a Pin. They make shopping easier by including real-time pricing, availability, and where to buy a product.
Pinterest Conversion Tag: A piece of code that’s added to your ecommerce store (but not visible to users), allowing you to track how successful your Promoted Pins are performing. (Similar to a Facebook Pixel.)
Twitter Terms
Tweet: A post made on Twitter.
Re-tweet: A re-post of another user’s post on Twitter.
Follow: Subscribing to the tweets of another Twitter user. This means that anything that user posts on Twitter will appear in your Twitter timeline. That user will also be able to send you a direct message.
Twitter Cards: The ability to attach images, videos, and other media to a tweet from a specific webpage by including the URL of that page in the tweet. To enable this feature, you’ll need to add a few lines of code to your site. This is a great way to make your tweet stand out and drive traffic to your site.
Reddit Terms
Upvote: The ability to "like" or "give a thumbs up" to an item/post in Reddit. Users must be logged in to complete the action. The upvotes minus the downvotes of an item will result in the numerical score shown in the left margin beside the item.
Downvote: The ability to give a thumbs down an item in Reddit. Users must be logged in to complete the action. The upvotes minus the downvotes of an item will result in the numerical score shown in the left margin beside the item.
Karma points: Also known as karma score or karma, points are given to users for the culmination of upvotes and downvotes on all links or comments they’ve posted.
General Social Terms
Organic Engagement: Unsolicited users engaging and/or following content, links, and profiles without being advertised to do so. For example, clicking on a brand’s content that was posted by a Facebook friend. I log onto Facebook, my friend posts and tags a photo with a specific brand, I click and follow through, and engage with content that I see.
Paid Engagement: Solicited users engaging, following, liking or otherwise engaging with content, links, and profiles after a promoted post populated in their feed. For example, clicking on an advertised or “sponsored” post from a Facebook feed or a recommended page in the Facebook sidebar. Paid posts include recommended pages that appear in the sidebar or as advertised or "sponsored" posts in your feed.
Organic and Paid terms are used individually, and applied to other terms as well: organic and paid reach, organic and paid impressions, etc.
Giveaway: A contest run by a business on a (or multiple) social media channels in an effort to increase their user base and/or user engagement, and that offers a prize to a selected winner.
Influencer: An individual user on a social network who has an engaged, niche fan base and whose content is designed to sway their audience. Businesses often partner with relevant influencers who can promote the business’ products to their audience.
Influencer Program: A type of marketing that focuses on a business working with influencers who have similar audiences to theirs. This type of marketing works well with visual posts.
Reach: Total number of users who actually see your content, ad, or profile.
Impressions: Total number of times your content or profile has been displayed to the audience in your reach.
Reach and Impressions can be tricky. Think of reach as how many people your post, ad, or profile got to, and impressions as how many times your ad was displayed to those individuals. Ex: An ad was shown to 100 people, so that’s our reach. Out of those 100 people, it was shown to them an average of 3x per person, so the number of impressions is 300.
Engagement: An action that a user takes with a post, user, profile, or link; for example, clicking on a link, liking a photo, following a user, etc.
Audience: The users who generally look at your content and profile.
Target Audience: The users who you would like to look at your content and profile.
Clicks: Actions completed during a campaign.
Campaign: An ongoing paid advertisement lasting days, weeks, or months. Campaigns can be designed to increase website traffic or page visits, or to boost a post to increase its impressions and reach.
Content: An image, text, or video that populates your feed, your tagged photos, or your Stories.
Google Analytics: Web analytics that track and report website traffic, sales, and additional helpful information about your audience. Data includes specific information about users who come to your site via social media channels and can be useful to determine the effectiveness of those channels and any campaigns you are running on them.
Ads Budget: An amount of money allocated to a specific campaign on a social media campaign. Depending on the network, these are often determined by a monthly amount.