Five Social Media Terms You Should Know
I’ll be the first to say it: social media is something we love to hate and hate to love, and it is entirely necessary as a tactic in your Marketing strategy. Although it can be intimidating and overwhelming at times, I’m here to help! Let’s simplify social media and create strategies to work for your business.
If you’re hiring a Marketing agency, or looking to expand your knowledge, there are a few social media terms you should add to your vocabulary. Having a general understanding of these terms will help you better assess your social media performance and ask your Marketing agency team the right questions.
KPI
A KPI is a key performance indicator. It’s a measurable metric for reporting the ROI of social media for a business. A few examples would be marketing qualified leads, follower growth/engagement, website visitors, referral and organic traffic, customer retention, and conversion rate. According to Hootsuite, “tracking specific numbers allows your social team to ensure its social strategy is connecting with the target audience and your brand is achieving its business goals.”
Engagement
Engagement is exactly what it sounds like— it’s measured by how many people engage with your content. This most commonly measures comments, shares, and likes on a social media post. Engagement is essential to track because it shows whether your target audience is interacting with your content or not. From there, you can make strategic decisions on how to move forward.
It’s important to note there is a Pay-to-Play element to social media, which refers to paid advertising on certain platforms (e.g. Facebook). Organic engagement (engagement that comes naturally from your audience, without any payment) is important to support your social media presence on a daily basis, but allocating some advertising dollars for social media should be included in your social strategy.
Impression
An impression measures how many people have seen your post on your social media platform of choice. This does not require any sort of engagement with your post— it’s simply how many eyeballs have been on your content.
UGC
UGC stands for user generated content, which is a fancy way of saying content created by the followers/fans/people who use the platform. This term is important for businesses to understand because brands can utilize this free content in social media strategies (but make sure the content meets your standards first!). For example: a clothing brand reposting photos customers have shared online of themselves wearing articles of clothing from the boutique. Another example: a tourism bureau sharing photos visitors have taken of their city on their own platforms.
IMPORTANT: If you’re using UGC, be sure to give credit to the original content creator and ask for permission to post.
Traffic
Traffic refers to the volume of people who visit your website. This is significant when it comes to social media because you can use your social presence to increase your web traffic through call-to-actions (CTAs), giveaways, freebies, and other strategic content.
You’re on your way to being a pro! While they’re plenty more to learn, we hope these terms help you feel a bit more knowledgeable. If you’re ready to learn more about using social media for your business, or you’re looking for more terms to learn, here’s a roundup of other blog posts you may find helpful:
Looking for a little more help to get you started? Drop me a note!