The Top 25 Social Media Terms You Need To Know

New terms, phrases and acronyms are constantly emerging across social networks. Businesses trying to grow (or simply exist) online are drowning in digital jargon. While many glossaries attempt to help overwhelmed social media users, the long lists of vocabulary continue to grow! Take a deep breath and know the basics.

Here are the top 25 social media terms you need to know:

1. Viral: Anything shared across social networks that get passed along rapidly. YouTube videos are a great example.

2. Platform: A system that manages content. For instance, WordPress is a platform that manages a community of blogs.

3. Authenticity: Used to describe “real” people behind blog posts and other social profiles.

4. Influence: An individual’s importance online is now measured by the Klout Score, a measurement of online influence.

5. B2B: Business to Business.

6. B2C: Business to Consumer.

7. Hashtag: HubSpot defines a hashtag as a “word or string of characters that starts with a number sign.” Identical hashtags are then grouped into a search thread.

8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The process of organizing your website to give it the best chance of appearing near the top of search engine rankings.

9. Transparency: Social media users expect to engage in considerate online conversations with individuals and businesses. We all aspire to be transparent, but are we?

10. Web 2.0: Refers to the second generation of the Web which means people now blog and create websites without needing specialized technical knowledge and training.

11. Synergy: Dare we simply say teamwork between companies online?

12. Trending: A word, phrase or topic that is popular on Twitter at a given moment.

13. e-Book: A book published in digital form.

14. Wiki: Simple web pages that can be edited by other users.

15. Blog: A site updated frequently by an individual or group to record opinions or information.

16. User-Generated-Content (UGC): An article describes UGC as being Latin for “crap” which is, quite frankly, well-put. UGC is anything published online by the Average Joe.

17. Tweeps: Twitter + People = Tweople.

18. Microblogging: Short message postings from a social media account. Facebook statuses and Twitter posts are two examples.

19. Algorithm: An “algo” is a system that suggests pages to search engines in response to a search query.

20. Widget: A widget is a small, attractive applications on a website such as a hit counter. Gizmos can make good link bait. Speaking of link bait…

21. Link bait: Designed to attract incoming links. News and widget hooks are good examples.

22. Meme: A means of taking viral concepts and making them everyday lingo. Check out “Know Your Meme.”

23. Engage: If you are communicating to other social media users, you are engaging.

24. Traffic: Traffic, traffic, traffic. This refers to the visitors that visit a website and it’s all we talk about these days. A bit of advice: You must decide if traffic to your site is really that important to your organization, or if engaging with a loyal customer matters more.

25. Tag: Indicates or labels what content is about.

What social media terms do you find difficult to understand? Do you have other words or acronyms that you think we should add to our list? We want to know.