When you get on any of the social networks, do you feel like you’re in a foreign country? Yes, the social media lingo is part of the culture of the networks. To be effective in your online marketing, you need to understand all this. Think of each network as its own country and you need to learn the lingo and the culture before you can effectively market your business on it. Then there are the letters: SEO, SEM, SERP, HTML, etc. Even if you hire someone to do your social media or digital marketing for you, how do you know if what they’re doing is right? How do you know if it’s effective? If they send you a report, do you know the difference between impressions and reach? Likes vs actions? Mentions vs tagging? Updated for 2024!
Learn the Social Media Lingo for Effective Marketing
Bookmark this page so you can refer to it as needed.
In this classic Wednesdays with the Wiz video, I explain the importance of learning the social media and digital marketing lingo…
Note: Though this video dates back to 2016, it’s still relevant today! I’m no longer doing Wednesdays with the Wiz nor the Social Savvy Solution. I do offer 1:1, customized coaching and training to help you navigate through these foreign countries we call social media networks.
Social Media and Digital Marketing Glossary and Lingo Guide
# – Hashtag – A hashtag is the pound or number sign (#) placed in front of a keyword or phrase to make it clickable and searchable. Hashtags only work with letters & numbers – no spaces between words. Hashtags are not case sensitive. Use them consistently in your posts to help classify them with major keywords. They work on all the social networks. Here’s more on how to use them effectively.
404 Not Found – When you arrive at a webpage that has been deleted. You don’t want any of these on your website.
A
Above the Fold – Taken from an old newspaper term, online, it indicates anything in the top part of a webpage before you need to start scrolling. You always want your calls-to-action above the fold. Don’t make people hunt for what you want them to do.
Adwords – Google’s paid advertising program. Now called Google Ads
Adsense – A commission-based way a website or blog can be monetized by adding ads via Google.
Affiliate Marketing – A system of monetizing a website or blog by advertising products or services and you get a commission.
Algorithm – How search engines (Google, Bing, social networks, etc.) work. It’s the system that brings up relevant content when a word or phrase is typed into a search box.
Alt Text Tag – When adding a picture or graphic to a webpage, add a text description with relevant keywords. The search engine doesn’t see pictures. It only sees text and links. This helps with SEO.
Analytics – Vital data from about your website and/or your social media networks. Analytics for your website needs to be setup, like Google Analytics or JetPack Site Statistics for. Both are free. Each of the social networks offer analytics to business pages and accounts. Check your analytics monthly to see what’s working and what’s not working and follower demographics. One of the analytics you get is the bounce rate.
Avatar – The square graphic or icon used to brand your social media profile pages. Do not try to upload a rectangular logo as it will get cut off. Business pages should have a logo here. Personal pages should have a head shot. Twitter has the largest one at 400 x 400 pixels. Create a square graphic for Twitter and you can use it for all the other networks. Do not take a smaller graphic and stretch it fit. It will look fuzzy. This is your online image. Use quality graphics.
B
Backlinks – Links on other websites linking back to your website. Do not buy these! It’s against Google’s rules. Create good backlinks by sharing your blog posts or web pages on social media, adding a link to your website in all your social network profiles and listings in membership sites. They must be relevant.
Black Hat SEO Tactics – Unscrupulous tactics in attempts to cheat the search engine so that your site comes up on the first page of Google search. Google now flags your website as spam and demotes you if you use these tactics. Follow Google’s rules and you’ll get found.
Blog – An online, ongoing chronicle, diary or journal. It’s the fresh content that Google is looking for. To be effective, blog 2-3 times a week.
Blogroll or Blogosphere – Where blogs are indexed.
Bookmark – Makes it easy to return to a website by bookmarking it. All browsers have the ability for you to bookmark websites and organize them.
Bounce Rate – A Google Analytics term for when someone visits your website and leaves in less than a few seconds. You want people to stay longer on your site. The longer they stay on your site the better the chances that they’ll take some action. You want to shoot for a bounce rate close or under 50%. A high bounce rate means that people are clicking into your site but not finding what they’re looking for.
Brick-and-Mortar – A business with a physical location: office, store, restaurant, etc., where you want customers to go to.
Browser – A tool used to view webpages: Google Chrome is the most popular web browser with over 69% of web surfers using it. Others are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), Mosaic’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Opera.
Broken Links – What a visitor to a website clicks on to get “404 Page Not Found”. It’s a link that goes to a page that’s been deleted. You don’t want these on your website.
Buying Journey – The route a person takes through the conversion funnel from becoming a visitor on your site to becoming a paying customer. Understanding your customers’ buying habits is crucial to online marketing success. You need to determine your niche market then your target market’s persona.
C
Call-to-Action (CTA) – A command on your website, at the end of a video or post enticing a visitor to do something. “Click here to Download the Free Ebook”; “Buy Now”; “Subscribe”; “Follow us!” “Share” If you don’t tell people what you want them to do, they won’t do it. Keep main CTAs above the fold. Repeat them at the end of blog posts and videos. You’ve had a visitor’s or viewer’s attention. Tell them what you want them to do.
CAN-Spam Act – All email marketing must be CAN-Spam Act compliant. Basically, you need to either have a prior relationship with a person on your list or they need to opt-in – give you permission to email them. Emails must have an “unsubscribe” link somewhere in the message so anyone can easily take themselves off the list if they want to. If someone requests to be removed from a list, you must comply. You cannot just buy a list of email addresses and start sending them marketing emails. It’s against the law. Fines are hefty.
Categories – As part of a blog, they help categorize your blog articles – topics. Choose one or two relevant categories. Have a list on your website of all your categories so people can browse through them to find the information they want and stay longer on your website. (See Bounce Rate).
Citation – When you quote someone on your blog or website, always cite the source with a link back to the originating website. This creates an external link which helps with SEO.
Click-Thru-Rate – A measurement in email marketing to compare the number of emails opened to the number of people that clicked on a link. If you send out 100 emails and 50 of them click on the CTA. You have a 50% click-thru-rate.
Cloud Computing – The practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.
Comments – The area at the bottom of a webpage or blog post where visitors can comment. If using a WordPress site, make sure you’ve got a plugin in to prevent spammers from spamming your comments. If you see bad English and comments that are irrelevant to the post, that’s spam. Delete it. You always want to approve comments before publishing them to your blog. On a WordPress site, there are free plugins that help block these.
Content Curation – Finding trusted sources of content that’s of interest to your followers and target market and sorting them so you can easily share them. Like a museum curator will look for pieces to display in the museum. A tool like Feedly helps you do this.
Content Management System (CMS) – A computer application that supports the creation and modification of digital content using a common user interface and thus usually supporting multiple users working in a collaborative environment. WordPress is a CMS.
Content Marketing – A combination of sharing other people’s content and your original content on social media with the objective of being known as an expert in your field and driving traffic to your website for lead generation or sales.
Conversion Rate – A measurement comparing the numbers of visitors to your website and how many of them clicked on a CTA. Works together with the Click-Thru-Rate. On your website, if you have 100 visitors and 2 converted (bought something, subscribed, or downloaded what you have to offer), then you have a 2% conversion rate. That’s about standard. Conversion rates vary by industry and depend on marketing strategy, CTAs and the product or service being sold.
Conversion Funnel – The journey a buyer takes from the first CTA to the ultimate sale.
Crawler – Also known as a “spider”, search engines like Google and Bing periodically “crawl” or “spider” web pages looking for text and links to index. Having the right text and links will help with SEO.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) – Website code that gives a site it’s “look”. It controls the size and style of fonts, headings, backgrounds and more.
Customer Service – Responding to customer inquiries, problems, and complaints in a timely manner.
Customer Relationships Management (CRM) – An approach to managing a company’s interaction with current and future customers. Works with Marketing Automation.
Cybercrime – Hacking into a company’s system or online account to steal private and/or account information which is later sold to a user to use for identity theft, blackmail or just plain stealing.
Cyber Security – Methods and systems used to prevent cybercrime.
D
Dark Web – The Internet for hackers, spies, and evil-doers. Not easily accessible by everyday users. Here’s were cyber crimes are committed.
Deep Web – Where encrypted passwords and user data are kept. More info.
Digital Marketing – A collective phrase that includes email, mobile, Internet, content, social media, marketing automation – anything done on a digital device.
Ding – What Google will do to your website if you try to cheat the search engine with black hat tactics. Basically, Google will either flag your site as spam and/or demote it. If you get dinged, nobody will be able to find you. Learn proper SEO.
Direct Messaging (DM) (Twitter) – A private message between two Twitter users. You have the ability to allow anyone to DM you, however, that opens you up to spammers. Otherwise, both users need to be following each other before you can DM.
Domain Authority – The domain authority of a website describes its relevance for a specific subject area or industry. This relevance has a direct impact on its ranking by search engines, trying to assess domain authority through automated analytic algorithms. (Wikipedia)
Domain Name – The address or URL of a website. They could end in .com, .org, .net, .co, .biz, etc.
Drip Campaign – Part of the conversion funnel using marketing automation to guide a potential customer into a sale by “dripping” or sending them specific, personalized emails at certain logical intervals.
Duplicate Content – Mirroring content word-for-word on more than one webpage. The original content gets higher priority in Google search. Too many duplicates get demoted. There are proper ways to repurpose content so Google won’t ding you. Add a link at the bottom of the copy with a link back to the original. “This article originally appeared on…”
E
E-E-A-T — What Google looks for in a website for ranking: Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
eCommerce – A website that sells products or services where a user can purchase what they want without interacting with a human being.
eBook – A book in downloadable digital format usually PDF or Amazon Kindle.
Email List – A list of email addresses obtained from capturing leads from a website with a CTA. They have to be CAN-Spam Act compliant.
Email Marketing – Sending promotional emails, newsletters or notifications to potential and current clients with the objective to get them to buy. Must be CAN-Spam Act compliant.
Embedding – Obtaining code for a video, podcast, or social media post that gets pasted in the “text” or “html” tab of a website or blog post so that the video or media will render on the page. A video can be viewed on the webpage. When clicked on, it will go to the original source. This is not stealing, but sharing a link.
Engagement – When a user engages with a post on social media. Could be alike, reaction, comment, share or click. Engagement is measured and reported in the network’s analytics or insights.
External Links – Links going to relevant websites outside of your own website. This helps with SEO. Always have the link open in a new tab so the visitor doesn’t lose your website.
F
Facebook – A social media network with over 2 billion monthly active users. Their March 2018 algorithm change makes it challenging for business pages to get good visibility.
Feed – Every blog that is setup correctly has a feed that people can subscribe to. See RSS. Use a tool like Feedburner to properly set it up. This is crucial to use a tool like HootSuite or Dlvr.it to automatically share to social media when a blog article is published.
Feedly – An online RSS Feed Reader. Your online newsstand. Subscribe to blogs or magazines and categorize them.
Friend – A connection on Facebook. You should know the person before you send them a Friend Request. You can follow someone and not be friends with them. You can also unfollow someone and not see their posts without unfriending them.
Focus Keyword – On a WordPress website, one main keyword or 2-3-word phrase that is the main topic of a page or a blog post. Used with SEO by Yoast plugin to help optimize each page for the search engine.
Follow – When you follow someone on a social network you will see everything they post in your news feed.
Follower – Someone who follows a user on a social network.
Following – The people that follow a user or that a user follows.
G
Google – The most popular search engine. Google has over 88% of global searches. Google’s goal is to give the searcher exactly what they’re searching for. Google wants fresh, relevant content written for the human reader in natural language.
Google Juice – Anything that helps in search engine optimization: relevant links, proper use of keywords, blogging at least once a week, etc.
Google Mobile Search – Using the Google search engine on a mobile device.
Google My Business – Google Places & Maps are now “Google My Business”. If you want your business to come up in Google search, you need to have this set-up correctly. If you have a brick-and-mortar location, the choose location. If you work from home, select to not have your address shown.
Groups – Communities on Facebook or LinkedIn where you can engage with like-minded people. Join groups for your industry, where your target market is, local, national or global groups. Read the group rules and respect them. Don’t spam the groups and don’t post too often.
H
Hackers – Nasty, evil people who have nothing better to do in life than to make other people’s lives miserable. Hackers will hack into a website or online account just because they can or to steal or hold it hostage for ransom. Make sure your passwords are difficult to figure out and that you have security measures and a back-up system on your website.
Handle – A username on Twitter.
Hashtags – See (#) above.
Heading Tags – H1, H2, H3, etc. CSS formatting that helps break up a webpage or blog post. Have your focus keyword in at least one heading tag for search engine optimization. The higher the number, the smaller the typeface. Usually in bold. H1 is almost always used for the page or blog post title. There should only be on H1 tag per page. All others are “subheadings”.
HootSuite – A tool to help marketers manage several social media accounts and schedule posts out into the future.
HTML – HyperText Markup Language is the standard markup language used to create web pages. The code behind what is seen on a page.
Hyperlink (Link) – A word, phrase or a graphic that is connected to another web page (URL). Having relevant hyperlinks, both Internal and External, help with SEO.
I
IGTV — Instagram TV — A separate mobile app for sharing longer videos which connects to an Instagram account.
Impressions – Interchanged with Reach. How the social networks or PPC advertising measures how many people see an ad or a post when they are logged in.
Instagram – Owned by Facebook, it’s a mobile app where users can share square pictures.
Inbound Marketing – A name coined by the founders of HubSpot to describe today’s marketing. A consumer will search for what they want when they want or need it. They are in control. As opposed to Outbound Marketing.
Insights – Data provided by social networks that give you demographics and analytics on your business account. Usually a part of their advertising program, but it is available for free to business users. Insights should be checked monthly to see what’s working and what’s not working. See analytics.
Internal Links – Links in a page or blog post that go to other content within a website. These help with SEO and keeping people on your website longer hence reducing the Bounce Rate (see above).
IP Address – Internet Protocol address – a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer, mobile phone, tablet) that is accessing the Internet. This is how usage is tracked by Google Analytics.
K
Keyword (SEO) – A word or phrase that is related to content on a website that a searcher will enter into the search box to find what they are looking for.
Keyword Density – How many times a focus keyword is used in a blog post. SEO by Yoast plugin measures this for you on WordPress. You don’t want the density too low or too high.
Keyword Research – Using an online tool like the Google Keyword Tool (free, but a part of their Ads program) to find keywords with high monthly searches in any given geographic area with low to medium competition (not used that often on other websites).
Keyword Stuffing – Putting every single possible keyword in one paragraph without considering grammar. This is a black hat tactic and can get you dinged by Google.
KPI (Key Performance Indicators) – Metrics that are important to your business. These should be set before you start marketing.
L
Landing Page – A specific page promoting one product or service for lead generation/capture. The idea is to not confuse a visitor who clicks on an ad or a promotional CTA. A landing page should not have regular website navigation.
Lead – A visitor to a website that is interested in learning more about a product or service or clicks on a CTA to obtain a freebie. This is a warm lead. A hot lead is someone that contacts you directly with a question and is ready to buy.
Lead Generation Capture (lead gen) – Using a CTA on a website to turn a visitor into a lead. The CTA must be enticing enough so they will give you their email address in exchange for a freebie. The lead is then put in a drip campaign to nurture them into a sale.
Link – See Hyperlink.
LinkedIn – The social media network for professionals. It’s like the chamber of commerce on steroids. You go there to connect with people. A person has an account (white pages) and then can create a company profile (yellow pages). You are connected to your company as an employee. Only legitimate companies can have a profile on LinkedIn. A business cannot have a personal profile. See Groups.
Live Streaming Video – A user can broadcast live video feed from any mobile device with the latest app, a good Internet or cell phone connection, a charged battery and space on the device. Available on most social media networks. Videos can be saved and downloaded to be shared on YouTube or embedded on a website. Tips on Video Marketing Strategy
Local Search – Searching for a local brick-and-mortar business mostly done on a mobile device.
Long-Tail Keywords – A keyword phrase, like a question, a searcher may enter into the search box. More than one word.
M
Marketing Automation – An automated system of email messages that guides a potential customer through series of promotional emails to a sale.
Meme – An activity, concept, catchphrase or piece of media which goes viral, from person to person via the Internet. It could be a video, hashtag and usually comical.
Mentioning – On Twitter, when you include someone’s username with the @ sign. They get notified when you do so. Same as Tagging on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Menu Bar – The navigation bar at the top of a website to make it easy to move from one page to another within the site.
Meta Tags – The <meta> description in the background code of a website. Usually found at the top of a page. The Meta Description is what appears on the search engine results page with a description of that page. Helps with SEO.
Messenger – a Facebook text messaging app for mobile devices. Businesses can receive messages from visitors on their business page. Do not put “Message Us” as your call-to-action on your Facebook page unless you’re going to monitor Messenger though it’s mobile app daily and respond quickly. Facebook expects a 15-minute response rate.
Microblogging – Short posts like those on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook without linking to a longer article. All the text is in the message.
N
Native Video – On Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, uploading a video directly to your business page rather than just sharing a link. The networks give more exposure to native videos.
Navigation – The menu bar that helps a visitor to a website navigate easily through the site.
Newsfeed – The “news ticker” of posts that a user sees when first logging on to a social network. A user sees all of the posts from connections, friends and pages they follow or have liked. On Facebook, you can view “Top Stories” or “Most Recent” by making the selection from the top left column.
Niche Marketing – The subset of the market on which a specific product or service is focused. Clearly defining a business’s target market niche is the first step in developing a strategic marketing plan. A business can have more than one target market niche. Use the resource, Define Your Target Market Workbook as a tool to help you create target market personas.
Notifications – On any given network, you can be notified by email, text message or somewhere on your profile page if you have any notifications. I suggest to turn off email or text message notifications as they can become annoying. You’ll be notified when you have new followers, someone likes, comments or shares one of your posts, if you have a message, etc. On mobile devices, you must have notifications turned on in settings. You can control who sends you notifications and how you receive them.
O
On-Demand – Having pre-recorded videos or webinars that a user can watch when they want to or “on demand” rather than live streaming.
Open Rate – This is a measurement with an email marketing service that shows how many recipients clicked to open an email message. The percentage is calculated based on how many emails were sent out.
Opt-in – When someone voluntarily joins an email or newsletter list. Some services require a double opt-in where the subscriber will get another message assuring that they do want to subscribe. Part of the CAN-Spam ACT.
Optimization – Making sure a web page, blog post, social media profile has all the pertinent keywords so that it will come up when someone searches for those keywords. On a web page, this also includes meta tags and title tags.
Organic Search Results – Non-paid search engine page results. These come up in order of relevancy to the search term and the freshness of the content. 80% of people ignore Google ads (source). They go for the organic search results.
Outbound Links – See External Links.
Outbound Marketing – Old-fashioned broadcast marketing like print, TV and radio advertisements. A business broadcasted their message in hopes that their target market saw, read or heard it and called or came to their place of business. Today’s marketing is Inbound Marketing.
P
Page Views – A measurement of how many pages a visitor viewed on a website.
Pain Points – Problems your target market has that you are going to alleviate with your product or service. Defining these is crucial to marketing success.
Passwords – A security measure to prevent a hacker from obtaining access to an online account.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – Paid advertising on Google or any of the social networks. You set a dollar value of what you want to spend for the time an ad runs and based on the target reach. Your account is charged when a user clicks on your ad to go to the website or whatever action they are to take. The more popular a search keyword, the more expensive it is.
Payment Gateway – For eCommerce sites, a system to collect payment online.
PDF (Portable Document Format) – a file format used to present documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it. (Wikipedia). Google does not index PDFs all the way. They don’t help with SEO.
Periscope – A live video streaming app owned by Twitter. It has been incorporated into the Twitter live streaming system.
Pin – A saved picture or video on Pinterest. Pinning pictures and videos from your website helps with SEO as it takes the link with it.
Pin to the Top – On Facebook business pages, Twitter and LinkedIn company pages, you can stick a post to the top of your page for extra exposure. It stays there until you take it down or replace it. All subsequent posts fall under it. Now you can also “feature” a post on your LinkedIn personal profile page.
Pinterest – “The World’s Catalog of Ideas” Where people go to plan how they’re going to spend their money. You can have a personal account with your personal email and a business account with a business email. Keep them separate.
Pinterest Boards – On Pinterest, categories where pinners save what they’re interested in.
Pinning – The act of adding a pin to a board on Pinterest.
Pinner – Someone who pins on Pinterest.
Plugin – An add-on to WordPress or other CMS that brings functionality to a website.
Podcast – An audio-only broadcast. Is considered a type of content in content marketing. Having a regular weekly or daily podcast works best.
Popups – Annoying CTAs that pop-up upon an action on a website. If you’re going to use them, keep them in the sides or lower corners and not obtrusive.
Post – Also known as status update, sharing something on social media. It can also be a blog post – an article written on your website.
Profile – Your account page on a social network. You have privacy settings and have control of what is posted. On a business page, it should have all the pertinent, keyword-centric information about the company.
Publish – What you do with a blog post that’s ready for prime time. Make sure you’ve proofread it, added graphics and is optimized for the search engines before hitting publish.
Q
Query – A search request for any given keyword or phrase.
Quora – A question & answer (Q&A) site where you can search for questions being asked in your industry and you can provide expert answers. This is also a good place to get topics for blogs.
R
Reach – Usually interchanged with impressions. This is the amount of people who had the potential to see your post or ad. Reach is nice, but you want engagement and click-through rates. Your reach increases every time a post is shared by the number of friends or followers that user has.
Real-Time – What’s happening right now. Twitter is the one social network where you can find out what people are talking about at any given time. See trending.
Repinning – Saving a pin found on Pinterest on one of your boards.
Reply – Responding to a direct message or tweet on Twitter, a comment on Facebook or LinkedIn or an email message.
Re-purposing Content – Re-posting content already found elsewhere on the Internet. So you don’t get dinged by Google, you must put a line somewhere on the page saying something like, “This article originally appeared on _______________ (website link).” Google gives authority to the original article, but you can use the 2nd posting on say, LinkedIn, to help with SEO and to drive more traffic to your site.
Response Rate – A feature on Facebook business pages where they track how fast a business responds to a comment or message on their business page. Fast responders will get a badge.
Retweet – On Twitter, sharing a tweet that someone else posted with your following.
ROI (Return on Investment) – There is no formula for calculating ROI with social media marketing. Think of all the costs involved including time and talent. KPIs are a better way of measuring the effectiveness of your online efforts.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – The system that makes it easy to subscribe to a blog via email or a reader like Feedly. See Feed.
S
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Method of getting a web page to come up on the first page of Google search.
Security – See Cyber Security.
SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) – The result pages of any given search term.
Share – Posting content on a social network that your followers and connections will see.
Shopping Cart – A feature of eCommerce where users can buy several products at once through a payment gateway.
Sidebar – A navigation bar on either or both sides of a page or blog with CTAs.
SMART Goals – Goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. The first step creating a Strategic Plan.
SnapChat – A social network for the younger demographic (12-24 year-olds). Only on mobile devices.
Social Amplification – What you get when one of your followers shares a post with their followers. Your reach increases.
Social Media – An online network or community that people use to keep up with family, friends, businesses, celebrities, style, sports and entertainment. Also a source of news and information.
Spam – Unwanted and unsolicited promotions either via email or posting in groups. Don’t do it. Community members usually police their own groups and report or flag spammers. Do this too much and your account can be suspended by the network.
Spider – See Crawler.
Status Update – See post.
Sticky Post – A blog post that is stuck to the top of the blog page to highlight it. Similar to pinned to the top but on your website.
Strategic Plan – An outline of the strategy to use to meet the smart goals. There should be a strategy for each social media network.
Sub-directory – A directory of web pages and files under a domain name – ie: domain.com/subdirectory
Sub-domain – A domain that’s part of a main domain – ie: subdomain.domain.com
Sub-heading – Heading tags smaller than the H1 tag that is usually the title. The font size gets smaller as the number gets higher. H2, H3, H4 and so on.
Subscriber – Someone that subscribes to a blog via email or an RSS feed reader or subscribes to an email newsletter.
T
Tagging – Like mentioning on Twitter, on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram it’s the @ sign in front of a username. When you tag someone, they are notified.
Tag Cloud – A widget on a blog that shows all keyword tags. The ones in larger fonts size are the ones used more often. This makes it easy for visitors to your site to stay longer looking at more information.
Tags – Relevant keywords that you indicate in a blog post.
Tactical Plan – A plan of action to implement the strategic plan. How much time you’re going to spend on each network daily; tasks to do weekly and monthly.
Target Market Persona – Once you’ve determined your target market niche, create fictional characters representing your perfect customer. This will help you understand their buying decisions and their typical buying journey. You also need to identify their pain points.
Testimonials – Your best selling tools are happy camper customers leaving reviews and testimonials.
TikTok – A relatively new network run from China that’s popular with the younger generation. Similar to SnapChat.
Title Tag – This is the name of the page that shows in the tab at the top of a browser. For the home page of a website, it should have the company name and the location if a business is local. “Home” is not the name of your business. Neither is “About”. Make it keyword-centric.
Trending Topics – On Twitter, at any given time of day you can see what people are talking about in real-time. Usually, a topic will start trending on Twitter first and a little later on Facebook.
Traffic – Visitors to your website. You want to see this increasing month-to-month if your business is growing. If it’s declining, then you need to restructure your strategic plan.
Troll – Nasty people that are pests online. They will post nasty comments on Twitter, and on live streaming. The best thing to do is block them and report them.
Tumblr – A social network for people under 40 to blog, post videos and pictures. It’s still used by Millennials.
Twitter – A microblogging network where people post tweets in 280 characters or less. It’s what’s happening right now in real-time.
Twitter Chat – A real-time chat on Twitter using a hashtag on a topic. The idea is to promote it in advance and get people participating with the hashtag so that it starts trending.
Tweet – A post that is 280 characters or less on Twitter.
U
Unique Value Proposition – Also known as a unique selling proposition (USP), your UVP is a clear statement that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer’s needs and what distinguishes you from the competition. Your unique value proposition should appear prominently on your landing page and in every marketing campaign. (Google)
URL (Universal Resource Locator) – The address of your website starting with http:// or https://.
URL Shortener – Sometimes a URL can be ridiculously long and it looks terrible in print. A free service is bit.ly which will also track how many clicks your post has gotten. It’s also a good way to track link clicks.
User Experience (UX) – In website design, is the degree to which a site can be used by specified consumers to achieve tracked objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Put simply, it works and it’s easy for even the least techie person to use.
User Generated Content (UGC) – Pictures or videos created by a consumer of a product or service used in marketing.
User Interface (UI) – Every part of your online marketing that a visitor will encounter from your website to social media pages. A good UI leads to a good UX which leads to a sale.
Username – The account name of a user in any given network or online service.
V
Video Marketing – Using video to promote a business. A video marketing plan has both professionally created and informal videos. Live video streaming as well as User Generated Content (UGC) are part of a video marketing plan.
Viral Marketing – A video, picture or post can go viral when thousands of users share it with their friends.
Visitor – Someone who comes to your website. You want to turn visitors in to leads and leads into sales.
Vlog – A video blog created by embedding a video in a blog post.
W
Web 2.0 – The second stage of development of the World Wide Web, characterized especially by the change from static web pages to dynamic or user-generated content and the growth of social media. (Google)
Webinar – An live, online seminar.
White Hat SEO – SEO tactics approved by Google that won’t get you into trouble.
Widget – An online functional tool, usually with a CTA to help visitors do what you them to do.
Wiki – A website that provides collaborative modification of its content and structure directly from the web browser. Example: Wikipedia
WordPress – A popular content management system that can combine static web pages along with a blog and many other functions. Free WordPress.com where anyone can build a blog. Hosted WordPress.org for a website hosted at an Internet service provider.
Y
YouTube – A video broadcasting channel owned by Google. It is the second largest search engine. The most searched-for phrase is “how to”.