This industry is full of acronyms, techie lingo and worst of all, buzz words. It is important, however, if you’re going to start your own social network or engage in social media marketing, that you have some fundamental knowledge of these things. We recently discovered a few great “social dictionaries” to help with the educational effort. Below are some helpful links, as well as a few terms that especially good to know!
- Hubspot’s Social Media Marketing Glossary
- Constant Constant’s Common Social Media Terms
- ComputerDictionaries.org
Application Programing Interface (API) – An API is a documented interface that allows one software application to to interact with another application. An example of this is the Twitter API.
Blog – Blog is a word that was created from two words: “web log”. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Chat - Chat can refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, but traditionally refers to one-to-one communication through a text-based chat application commonly referred to as instant messaging applications.
Creative Commons – Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. It provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.
Disqus – Disqus is a comment system and moderation tool for your site. This service lets you add next-gen community management and social web integration to any site on any platform.
Flash Mob – A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.
Forums – Also known as a message board, a forum is an online discussion site. It originated as the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board, and a technological evolution of the dialup bulletin board system.
Google Documents – Google Documents is a group of web-based office applications that includes tools for word processing, presentations and spreadsheet analysis. All documents are stored and edited online and allow multiple people to collaborate on a document in real-time.
HTML – HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a programing language for web pages. Think of HTML as the brick-and-mortar of pages on the web — it provides content and structure while CSS supplies style. HTML has changed over the years and it is on the cusp of its next version: HTML5
Like – A “Like” is an action that can be made by a Facebook user. Instead of writing a comment for a message or a status update, a Facebook user can click the “Like” button as a quick way to show approval and share the message.
Mashup – A content mashup contains multiple types of media drawn from pre-existing sources to create a new work. Digital mashups allow individuals or businesses to create new pieces of content by combining multiple online content sources.
News Reader – A news reader allows users to aggregate articles from multiple websites into one place using RSS feeds. The purpose of these aggregators is to allow for a faster and more efficient consumption of information.
Permalink – A permalink is an address or URL of a particular post within a blog or website.
Sentiment – Sentiment is normally referred to as the attitude of user comments related to a brand online. Some social media monitoring tools measure sentiment.
Tag Cloud – A tag cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, typically used to describe the content of web sites
URL – A URL is most popularly known as the “address” of a web page on the World Wide Web, e.g. http://www.example.com
Viral Marketing – Viral marketing refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes.
Web Analytics – Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage
Widget – A widget is an element of a graphical user interface that displays an information arrangement changeable by the user, such as a window or text box.
Wiki – A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser, allowing for collaboration between users.
WordPress – WordPress is a content management system and contains blog publishing tools that allow users to host and publish blogs.
