Social Media Glossary –  The Ultimate A-Z Guide to SMO/SMM Terminology

Last Updated on April 27, 2023 by Subhash Jain

60+ SMO/SMM Terms Every SMO/SMM Beginner should know

The majority of digital marketers experienced and newbies both as well as SMO/SMM/SEO agencies struggle to understand many SMM and SMO terms because new terms are being coined regularly due to the evolution of social media networking, new practices, and new techniques. The businesses also face problems in understanding the offered deal with real sense because of unfamiliarity with SMM/SMO terminology.

Social media marketing (SMM) is a strategic off-page paid marketing tactic to use social media platforms to interact with target customers’ segments to increase sales, drive traffic and to build brand’s image. Social media optimization (SMO) is the strategic on-page modifications to use of social media networks upto full potential for increasing online presence of brand and awareness about the products/services to be promoted. Wouldn’t you like to maximize SMM and SMO benefits at minimum cost?

As one of the leading SMO agencies, we acquired practical and technical knowledge about how to set up a SMO campaign and run successfully to deliver results to the clients.

We have created the following alphabetical glossary of 60+ social media marketing (SMM) terms and social media optimization (SMO) terminology to help you all to leverage the benefits of social media campaigns with the brushed up skills.

Analytics

Analytics provides data-driven insights to help you improve the performance of SMM and SMO. Analytics reports inform you about average time on page, page views, engagement rate, CTR, etc.

Algorithm

It is a set of norms that decide the display of content and business profiles on social media platforms.

Ads Manager

It is a tool offered by Facebook to facilitate its users to create, run, analyze, and manage social ads.

Audience

It is a group of people that you target to promote your services or products through SMM. Different SMM posts are optimized for a different audience to let them feel a personalized touch.

Avatar

It is a small image created to represent you on a social network. Avatar can be a real photo, business logo, or anything that you want to use as your identity on social media platforms.

Average Response Time

It is a metric that denotes the time taken by a business to respond to a concern posted on social media.

Bookmarking

It is a small but important tool used by the users to save and share the link of information that they think is useful and reusable for them and others.

Business-to-Business (B2B)

The acronym B2B denotes the marketing practices adopted by businesses to tap the revenue generation potential from businesses. B2B is pointed for business-to-business sales.

Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

The acronym B2B denotes the marketing practices adopted by businesses to tap the revenue generation potential from the consumers of their products/services. B2C is pointed for business-to-consumer sales.

Bio

The social media bio is a short profile created to tell people about you or your business.

Boosted Post

It is a Facebook post of a business page that you promote as a paid advertisement to increase your reach of content to the target audience. Facebook Boost Post is different from the Facebook ad because of having limited options to set display.

Brand Awareness

It is an important metric to scale the success of SMM. The metric denotes how much people are aware of your brand. Brand awareness is measured in terms of impressions, mentions, and engagement.

Brand Advocate

A brand advocate is a customer who promotes/endorses your products and services on social media platforms at no charge but because he likes these.

Business Manager

This Facebook tool helps organizations to securely manage their business profiles, catalogs, ad accounts, and authorized viewers.

Chatbot

It is a bot that uses artificial intelligence to respond to customer interactions automatically through messaging apps.

Collective Intelligence

It is the collective intelligence that emerged from the streamlined collaboration and healthy competition of individuals. It helps businesses for consensus decision-making.

Comment

It is a response to a blog post or message by the reader.

Cost Per Mille (CPM)

This social media marketing metric refers to the cost you pay for 1,000 impressions. Tracking CPM becomes important to keep the entire SMM advertisement under the permissible budget as well as to justify the returns.

Crisis Management

It is a practice commenced to manage events triggered to damage your brand’s reputation. Social media marketing managers respond quickly to null the impressions and possible harm of negative comments about the business.

Connections

It is a term used on LinkedIn to denote professional contacts. The number of quality LinkedIn connections establish your professional credibility.

Cross-Channel

In social media marketing, cross-channel marketing is a strategy to popularize your brand, services, products, or business by sharing the same content on multiple social media platforms. Wider reach for enhanced visibility of posts is the major objective of cross-channel marketing.

Crowdsourcing

It is an SMM practice to invite and encourage social media users to create new ideas or content. It makes your social media followers more involved and engaged with your brand.

Dark Post

It is an unpublished social media post that is promoted as an ad for a particular audience. This post does not appear in organic search results and on the brand’s social media timeline. 

Dark Social

These are “invisible” shares circulated through private distribution channels like messaging apps, emails, and texting. The analytics tools cannot track these shares creating traffic to a website. Dark socials become important because these may dent the picture of a website or a campaign’s performance you get through analytics. 

Direct Message (DM)

It is direct messaging between social media users; it is visible only to the sender and recipient.

Disappearing Content

It is the content shared on social media platforms with a time limit to access; this content disappears automatically after a set period.

Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy is a marketing or promotional practice commenced by the employees to support and promote the brand, services, or products of their organization on particular social media networks to strengthen trust factor.

Emoji

These are small cartoonish images used to make social media messages more attractive.

Endorsement

It is a term used on LinkedIn social media platform. It is a recognition and appreciation of the skill/s of a LinkedIn member by another LinkedIn member.

Engagement Rate

This social media metric is used to scale the success of an ongoing SMM campaign; the metric describes the number of likes, shares, and comments received by the shared post.

Feeds

Feeds are the widgets created by social media aggregators containing content shared through different social media accounts.

Follower

A follower is a social media user who subscribes to get updates about all the posts of a business or a brand. The numbers of followers indicate the popularity of a brand or business.  

FOMO

It is the acronym for ‘Fear of Missing Out’. The term is used to describe a feeling or anxiety of a social media user when he thinks that other people are getting more value from a post and he might be missing something important.

Frequency

This social media advertising term refers to how many times your ad is displayed to your target audience.

GIF

Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is the small-scale animated film clip often used in social media marketing to make the posts better attention-drawing.

Hashtag

It is a way of connecting the social media posts to other relevant posts trending high to draw wider-scale attention and promotion.

 Header Image

It is an image used at the top of a social media profile. It represents your business to make the message clear to visitors at a first glance.

Impressions

This social media metric tells about the number of times when your post appeared in users’ feeds.

Listicle

It is a post created in the form of a list to make the shared message/information quick to access and understand.

Mashup

Social media mashup is a web application or website that combines the content existing on more than one source to create an integrated experience.

Meme

Memes in social media marketing are used to add funny elements to shared posts to make these viral faster. Brands often use a meme to make their social media sharing more attractive for the younger audience.

Native Advertising

 It is a social media marketing tactic to show a paid ad in a way that looks organic but with extended reach.

News-Jacking

It is an SMM technique of connecting a brand with a popular current event to draw media attention for brand exposure.

Objectives

Objectives of SMM are the results that you expect as ROI of an ad campaign. The objectives of SMM may be different for different campaigns like increasing traffic, brand awareness, engagement, conversions, and more.

Reach

This SMM metric tells about how many people see your post. Reach is an indicator of the audience size you succeed to tap for brand awareness.

Relevance Score

Facebook Ads Manager provides this metric to help you assess how well your ad is performing to get a response from the target audience; the score is measured on a scale of 1 to 10.

 RSS Feed

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a standardized content distribution practice. RSS feed integration in an SMM strategy helps you send timely alerts to all the subscribers whenever you share a post.

Sentiment Analysis

Social media Sentiment analysis presents a picture of how the target audience feels about a brand. Sentiment analysis takes into account the opinions and emotions of tapped customers.

Shareable Content

This social media content is more likely to be shared by the users across their social media network because they find the information useful, valuable, unique, and inspiring.

Social Customer Service

Also called social customer care service is a support provided via social media to address the customers’ concerns.

Social Listening

It tells about how SMM managers track conversations related to their business interests. Social listening provides trends-based insights about the brand/product/service being promoted through the SMM campaign.

Social Media Monitoring

It is a practice of tracking the mentions, endorsements, and comments to know about the social image of a brand. It helps you know the reactions and expectations of the target audience.

Social Media ROI

It is a measurement of revenue to assess the success of an SMM campaign in terms of financial gains.

Social Selling

It is a practice of using the presence and repute of a brand on social media channels to reach the potential buyers, start communication to develop a relationship, generate leads by information sharing, and convert leads into sales.

Targeting

It is an SMM practice to reach a particular community of potential audiences.

Trending Topic

This topic gets a sudden surge of popularity and searches on social media platforms. SMM posts are linked to trending topics to improve visibility.   

Troll

This term refers to the responses of antagonist viewers to an inflammatory, irrelevant, disruptive, or offensive SMM post. Sometimes this practice is adopted to draw the attention of the masses.

User-Generated Content (UGC)

It is the content created by unbiased fans of a brand just because they liked its products/services. UGC plays a vital role in SMM for strengthening the trust factor and reputation of a brand.

Vanity Metric

The vanity metrics in social media marketing campaigns are used to impress the followers and potential audience by increasing brand’s popularity as well as to judge the effectiveness of ongoing campaigns. The “vanity metrics” include impressions, comments, followers, likes, shares, open rates, traffic, views, etc but these don’t refer to the ROI of an SMM campaign.

Viral

It is a chain of sharing the content on social media platforms by the followers of a brand. Social media content that goes viral delivers multiple benefits from the perspectives of sales and marketing.

Vlogging

Vlogging is a popular SMM practice to create video content that tells a story or informs the audience about a particular topic like a product review or event.

Please keep exploring SMO Glossary / SMM Terminology  to keep you updated about the latest additions. 

About Author

Subhash Jain is the Founder of Samyak Online – the top social media service provider agency in India. Are you looking for SMO/SMM services to increase your website traffic, leads and brand recognition? Contact us for Free SMO/SMM Proposal.

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