Social Media Vocabulary—It’s A Language All Its Own

Since our focus the past few weeks has been all things social media, I thought it might be helpful (and fun!) to end the month with a list of terms commonly found in our social media and other online circles. If you’re like me sometimes, just reading through some of today’s articles and postings is like trying to read a foreign language! Avatars and hashtags and tweets, oh my! Not to mention the acronyms! There’s an acronym for almost everything these days! LOL, right?

Here’s a quick list of some of today’s widely-used terms in social media and online in general. Of course, the key word here is today, because new ones are trending and going viral all the time!

To give kudos where kudos are due, the list below was compiled from a recent blog on the awesome social media site, HubSpot.com. To keep the list here brief, some of the descriptions have been shortened. You can find HubSpot’s full list in its entirety here.

• Avatar – An avatar is an image or username that represents a person online, most often within forums and social networks.
• Chat – Chat can refer to any kind of communication over the internet but traditionally refers to one-to-one communication through a text-based chat application, commonly referred to as instant messaging (IM) applications.
• Connections – The LinkedIn equivalent of a Facebook ‘friend’ is a ‘connection.’
• Fans – Fans is the term used to describe people who like your Facebook Page.
• Favorite – Represented by the small star icon on Twitter, favoriting a tweet signals to the creator that you liked their content or post.
• Follower – In a social media setting, a follower refers to a person who subscribes to your account in order to receive your updates.
• Friends – Friends is the term used on Facebook to represent the connections you make and the people you follow.
• Handle – Handle is the term used to describe someone’s @username on Twitter.
• Hashtag – A hashtag is a tag used on a variety of social networks as a way to annotate a message. A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by a “#” (i.e. #InboundMarketing).
• Like – A Like is an action that can be made by a Facebook or Instagram user.
• Meme – A meme on the internet is used to describe a thought, idea, joke, or concept that’s widely shared online. It is typically an image with text above and below it, but can also come in video and link form.
• Mention – A mention is a Twitter term used to describe an instance in which a user includes someone else’s @username in their tweet to attribute a piece of content or start a discussion.
• Recommendation – A recommendation on LinkedIn is a term used to describe a written note from another LinkedIn member that aims to reinforce the user’s professional credibility or expertise.
• Retweet – A retweet is when someone on Twitter sees your message and decides to re-share it with his or her followers.
• Tag – Tagging is a social media functionality commonly used on Facebook and Instagram that allows users to create a link back to the profile of the person shown in the picture or targeted by the update.

Here are just a few of the common acronyms you’re likely to see…

• Application Programming Interface (API) – An API is a documented interface that allows one software application to interact with another application.
• Direct Message– Direct messages — also referred to as “DMs” — are private conversations that occur on Twitter.
• Instant Messaging – Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time, direct text-based communication between two or more people.
• PPC – PPC is an acronym for pay per click. Pay per click is an online advertising model in which advertisers display ads on various websites or search engines and pay when a visitor clicks through.
• RSS Feed – RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blogs and videos in a standardized format.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of unpaid traffic to a website from search engines.

And then, just for fun, here are a few common texting abbreviations that you often see…

• AAR – At Any Rate
• ADDY – Address
• BRB – Be Right Back
• BRT – Be Right There
• BW – Best Wishes
• CAAC – Cool As A Cucumber
• CM – Call Me
• COB – Close Of Business
• COL – Chuckle Out Loud
• DIY – Do It Yourself
• DK – Don’t Know
• IMO – In My Opinion
• IYSS – If You Say So
• IKR – I Know, Right?
• LOL – Laughing Out Loud or Lots Of Love

Now that you know some of the terms and fun shortcuts, you’ll be all CAAC the next time you Friend, Like, Connect, Link and Mention!