A Marketing Glossary of Terms and Jargon Buster
Are you fluent in social media speak? The world of influencer marketing and social media can be a complicated place full of new developments and technologies. And to complicate matters even more, this fast-paced industry has developed its own dictionary of terms very rapidly.
Some 320 new influencer marketing focused platforms and agencies entered the market over the last 12 months so with business booming and new terminology being used all the time, it can sometimes feel hard to keep up to speed.
We have put together a comprehensive, jargon busting glossary of key industry terms. We hope that the below will help both those who have been in the industry for many years, and to educate any newcomers.
- Advocate - A person who has a genuine affinity towards a brand and actively endorses or promotes the brand to their network both online and offline, organically. Advocates are not always influencers. Some brand advocates will have a large social following and authority in the space, while others will not. Advocates authentically believe in the brand’s products or services and recommend them to their network.
- Activation - A marketing initiative to drive users to action through interactions and experiences.
- Affiliation - Affiliate marketing is a partnership and a process by which commissions are earned through generating sales for another person or company.
- Ambassador - An individual who represents a brand and can be the face of a campaign for a specified duration.
- Amplify - To drive additional distribution through optimised content and reach a larger audience.
- Backlink - Backlinks are links from outside domains that point to pages on your domain; essentially linking back from their domain to your website.
- Blogger - Someone (an individual or a business) who maintains a blog with regular entries of content on a specific topic, descriptions of events, or other resources such as graphics or video.
- Brand awareness - The extent to which consumers are familiar with the distinctive qualities or image of a brand; goods or services.
- Branded content ad - Branded content (also known as branded entertainment) is the practice of marketing via the creation of content that is funded or outright produced by an advertiser.
- Call to action CTA - A call to action is a message that aims to persuade the visitor (viewer, audience member, user) to take a certain action. Common examples of influencer CTA’s are “like and comment” or “swipe up”. The intention is to improve the response rate of the post.
- Celebrity influencer - These might include movie stars, athletes, sportspersons, musicians, models, and other popular public figures of mainstream media. Some celebrities can be appointed as brand ambassadors and subsequently become the faces of these brands. Owing to their immense popularity, celebrities have a massive reach on social media platforms as well. However, they are often associated with a hefty price tag and can lack authenticity if they aren’t seen as a talented individual in their own right.
- Co-created content – this is when talent is professional guided through their content creation by a firm like Talent Village. This form of mediation between talent and the brand, can increase post approval by up to 85%.
- Click through rate - The ratio of users who click on a certain link to the number of total users who visit the page, post or advertisement. Influencer’s who generate high click through rates usually have highly engaged audiences who act on the content.
- Conversion - The proportion of people viewing an advertisement and ending up making a purchase through the URL associated with the content. Conversion is measured by influencers using tracking links or promo codes.
- Disclosure - A visible indicator, such as a written text that is required to clearly state the purpose of the collaboration, the connection between the influencer and the brand.
- DM - This stands for direct message, or a private message with a person on social media, especially Twitter.
- Endorsement -The approval for a brand’s product or service, integrated into influencers content in a way that generates awareness for the brand.
- Engagement rate - Engagement rate is a popular social media metric used to describe the amount of interaction, such as, likes, shares, comments, that a piece of content receives.
- Follower - A follower is a user who chooses to see all of another user's posts in their content feed. They follow that brand or person for regular updates and posts
- Follow links - Follow links are links that count as points, pushing SEO link juice and boosting the page rank of the linked-to sites, helping them go higher in the SERPs as a result.
- Guest post - Creating and publishing content on someone else’s website, social media or blog.
- Hashtag - A word or phrase preceded by a hash sign (#), used on social media and websites to identify content on a specific topic. Hash tags allow social users to easily search for keywords and follow a topic they are interested in. For instance, #love is the most widely used hashtag on Instagram and has been used in 1.2 billion posts.
- Impressions - An impression refers to a way in which marketers and advertisers keep track of every time ad is "fetched" and counted.
- Influencer - A person or group of people who possess greater than average potential to influence due to their frequency of communication, personal persuasiveness or size of following and/or a prominent popular social media.
- Instagram live - Instagram Live lets you broadcast video to your followers in real-time, but they can only watch while you're still streaming.
- Instagram stories - A feature within the Instagram app where users can capture and post related images and video content in a slideshow format.
- Like - A Like is an action that can be made by a social media user. Instead of writing a comment or sharing a post, a user can click the ‘Like’ button as a quick way to show approval. Interestingly some platforms, such as Instagram, are hiding likes placing a real emphasis on quality content over vanity metrics.
- Macro influencer - A macro influencer is someone who has an audience within the follower range of 50,000 to 300,000 followers on a particular social media channel. Their content is usually high-quality and is comprised of a focussed passion or topic.
- Nano influencer – An influencer characterised by a small yet engaged social media following. Nano-influencers usually have a few thousand followers (sometimes even less than that). They can come in handy for small businesses too as they are usually more cost effective.
- No follow link -The nofollow tag tells search engines to ignore that link so that the hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link's target in the search engine's index.
- Optimise - Social media optimisation (SMO) is the process of increasing the awareness of a product, brand or event by using several social media outlets and communities to generate viral publicity.
- Organic - Organic reach on social media refers to the number of people who come across your post without boosted distribution.
- Paid post - A blog or social media post that has been paid for to be produced. Often paid posts are produced by influencers or talent in collaboration with a brand in exchange for a form of compensation, monetary or otherwise.
- Reach - A measure of an influencer’s audience size.
- Regram - The act of reposting on Instagram. It involves screen-shotting someone’s else's original post, and then reposting it using the #regram and acknowledging the source of the original Instagram posting.
- Retweet – Used on the social media application Twitter, retweeting is reposting or forward a post by another user.
- Sentiment – The positive, negative or neutral impression the post gives.
- SEO - SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
Now you know the lingo, you are good to delve into the fast-paced world of social media… Are there any terms or phrases you think we’ve missed and need to be included in our glossary? Comment below...