10 Essential Social Media Terms You Need to Know

By Mikhail Acebo
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​As Social Media continues to become businesses’ most important marketing tool to reach wider audiences and promote their products further around the world, it becomes a marketing field on its own with important terminologies and rules on how organisations can market effectively. Knowing these 10 Essential Social Media Terms can help you familiarize with online advertising to better achieve your marketing goals: 

Algorithm
A coded program to be adhered to for calculations and other problem-solving computations by computer. In online marketing, sites like Facebook and how they optimize your ad sets to show to potential target audiences is governed by an algorithm. This is important on whether you want to configure your online ad campaigns manually or automatically. 

How Facebook operates its algorithm…

Analytics
The use of technology to gather data for purposes of analysis and evaluation. In social media marketing, this means data analytics like CTWs (Clicks to Websites), conversion rates and number of units by online users to your page or website. Businesses analyse these data to modify outreach targeting to achieve marketing goals.

An example of a Social Media Analytics…

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
A common unit that measures your social media marketing effectiveness in terms of actions performed by users. These actions can be clicking on an ad or a link in a marketing campaign. Depending on how you set your CTR standards for goals, a low CTR would mean lesser engagement with customers and a higher CTR would mean higher customer engagement. Part of marketing campaign is involving your target audience to do something that would compel them to buy your products/services, as exemplified by CTR.

CTR Rate Measurement

Content Marketing
Marketing based on marketing content that are educational, informative or entertaining like videos or articles. It’s intended to build customer loyalty and brand awareness. Common in social media marketing like posting nutrition tips from a gym, video on car repairs by automechanic company or online cooking lessons from a Food & Beverage company.

An example of Buzzfeed’s Content Marketing in the form of “Food & Nutrition tips” article

Display Ad
Small visual mediums on websites like images, video or audio. Can also be written. Mainly used for retargeting on users that have bought your products/services.

Display ads are often employed on right-hand side of websites or search engine results
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Conversion
A metric to indicate users’ “positive action” enacted on a website or social media page likes, sales, payments, newsletter signups or content downloads. Important when it comes to measuring earned revenue from social media.

The Conversion Process from product viewing to purchasing – online marketing aims to lead consumers to eventually purchase products
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CTA (Call to Action)
Any written or visual section giving specific instructions for users to act on. Examples are “click here”, “Download Now” or “submit feedback” related to gauging in conversions and improving customer engagement.

Example of a Call To Action on a website

PTAT
R​efers to the total amount of actions by online users in relation to your pages and/or posts like sharing, likes, comments or tags designated to promote brand awareness and reach intended target audience outreach goals. Depending on your PTAT goal standards, a “low” calculated PTAT indicates low brand exposure to its target audiences which means less people are talking about your products/services plus subsequently low marketing outreach and vice versa. It is important therefore to know your PTAT for your social media marketing activities and capitalize on the results to improve online customer engagement with your page.

PTAT is crucial to maintaining high customer engagement

Followers
Followers are online users that subscribes to a business’ social media page or its corporate websites for content updates like discounts, vouchers and other incentives in relation to products/services they’re interested in. Followings are used to define your conversion rates and quantify CTAs (Calls to Actions) in terms of how people interact with your social media page or website. Additionally, Followers are important to build long-term customer loyalties and product retargeting to maintain your organisation’s positive Brand Management image.

Gain your followers from diverse social media sites

Reach
Amount of People who have seen content from your social media page. There are many types of Reach but two are essential: 1) Total and 2) Post. The Former explains how many have seen your page content for last 7 days including views and visits in your social media page. The Latter explains how many have seen a specific online post in their newsfeeds. These two Reach types are important to your advertising campaigns, whether you’re seeking short-term or long-term social media marketing.

Wider Online Reach = more Followers gained = more online customers = achieve Marketing Goals

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References
www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-media-marketing/buzzwords-decoded-32-social-media-marketing-terms-explained-in-plain-english/
​blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-terms
blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-glossary-definitions/