My 20 not-so-obvious blogging terms post was a popular one, and it got me thinking of something along similar lines for social media. Social media is even more of a mystery to people than blogging is, so instead of going for the “not-so-obvious” here, I’m going for “dumbass prevention.” 
Enjoy, and if there’s anything else you want to know about social media marketing, ask away in the comments and I’ll find a way to incorporate everyone’s suggestions into another post.
This is why, yes, in certain cases, people really do give a shit about what you’re eating.
Backchannel
When there’s an event taking place, such as a conference or a concert, people are communicating with fellow participants as well as those not present via social media. This undercurrent of social media communications about the event is commonly referred to as the “backchannel.” Twitter is very popular for this because an event can have its own hashtag (voluntarily or involuntarily). This is important in marketing for gauging sentiment and reactions to the event.
Badge
A badge (also called a widget) is a little box of dynamic content which is automatically updated from a social media service. In the sidebar of Remarkablogger, for example, you see badges from Twitter and Google+. The Twitter one might more properly be considered a widget instead of a badge due to its size, but really, there’s no need to split hairs over names.
Engagement
Engagement is the level of interactions you have with others on social media. I prefer to think of engagement as two-way interactions: you say hello to someone and they say hello back, essentially. Dialogue of some kind. But some consider any interaction with your soical media content to be engagement, whether you respond to it or not. When you’re trying to measure engagement, it’s important to understand how your social media tool is measuring it.
Gravatar
Gravatar is a free service that lets you upload a picture to be used as your avatar by a large number of social media services. Avatar is name of the picture you use to represent yourself on the web or in a game (avatar is an ancient Sanskrit word that means “appearance” or “manifestation”). Having a Gravatar account means you have the same avatar (called a Gravatar) for many social media services. If you decide you want a different picture to represent you, changing your Gravatar automatically updates your avatar across many different services.
Influence
In social media marketing, influence is a measure of your ability to get others to take action. You may have a large audience, but if only a few follow your suggestions, you have little influence. The way I see it is that social media influence is a cousin to conversion for web pages. But what we want people to do and the ways they do it differ greatly from a web page to a social media post.
Insights
Insights specifically refers to Facebook’s page analytics. When you have a Facebook page (as opposed to a regular personal account), you can access Insights. This is vital if you wish to grow your Facebook audience and engagement. Important are:
- Likes
- Reach
- People talking about this
- Friends of Fans (friends of fans who then also liked your page, which indicates to some degree the influence you have)
Facebook will show you how much any of these numbers are increasing or decreasing over time.
Page
A social media page is usually a Facebook page, Google+ page, or LinkedIn Company Page. These are different from personal accounts: they have features needed by businesses (like analytics and comment moderation). Often these pages can have multiple administrators, too, unlike a personal account.
Reach
Reach is a measure of how many people are seeing your social media communications. This is directly related to how many people are “following” or “friending” you.
ROE (Return on Engagement)
You may have heard of Return on Investment (ROI): invest x number of dollars and get y number of dollars in return. But with social media, often you’re not spending money as much as time & effort. So, ROE, or, Return on Engagement makes a lot of sense. From a pure numbers viewpoint, the more engagements you have over social media, the more you’ll further your social media goals. Meeting your social media goals should translate into meeting your site & business goals. ROE is a huge topic, for more reading, here’s a good article.
Warning: if you want to avoid looking a “social media douchebag,” don’t throw this buzzword around too much, however it is a number to keep an eye on.
Social Clicks
One reason we share content on social media is because we want people to click on the links we provide. These are social clicks, as opposed to a link in a blog post or an email. The number of social clicks your social media posts receive is an indicator of influence and engagement. If you post a bunch of links on social media and people click on the links, you’re reaching them and potentially influencing them, even if they never publicly acknowledge such.
Social Graph
The social graph is technically a Facebook-related term, but people use it in the context of the entire social web (there’s a reason why Facebook has a Social Graph Search and no one else does). The social graph is a representation of all the social connections, similarities, and differences a person has with others in Facebook (or, more generically, other social media services).
Social Media Dashboard
When you’re doing social media marketing for your business/blog, posting the same or similar things to multiple services is a tedious, repetitive chore. Keeping an ear out for all the information that’s important to you in social media across multiple services is nigh next to impossible.
What you need is a central place to view all these different service’s streams and interactions. These central “places” in terms of web software are called social media dashboards. Social media dashboards let you operate multiple social media accounts for multiple social media services with less repetition and redundancy. HootSuite is a prime example of a social media dashboard.
Social Sign-in
Allowing people to sign in to a website using an existing account with another service is a very convenient trend. Usually, if people already have a Google, Facebook, or Twitter account, they can use one of those accounts to sign up for and login to any number of web services, including social media services and sites.
Stream
Most social media services show you updates from those you follow in the form of a stream. A stream is a list of updates, one after another, usually in reverse chronological order (newest at the top, oldest at the bottom). Stream is a general term. Some services have specific terms for their streams, such as Facebook’s Timeline.
Thumbnail
When you share a web page on a social media service, often there is a picture in the page that will be shared in addition to its headline or title. That picture is usually small, so we call it a thumbnail. Because it’s only as big as your thumbnail, get it? PEOPLE ARE SO CLEVER. In fact, you’ll often see it shortened to just thumb. Choosing a good image for your posts can affect the engagement of your social content. People are attracted to appealing images.
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