Social Media Glossary

Running two versions of a post or ad that differ in exactly one element — headline, image, call to action — and comparing results. Changing more than one variable makes the winner impossible to explain.

The ranking system that decides which posts each user sees and in what order, based on predicted interest rather than chronology.

A short written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers. It makes posts accessible to blind and low-vision users and gives platforms extra context about what the image contains.

An AMA, short for Ask Me Anything, is a live or time-boxed session where a creator or brand answers audience questions submitted in real time, usually through comments or a dedicated post.

The cap a platform places on how many API requests an app may make in a time window. Hitting it makes publishing or analytics tools fail temporarily until the window resets.

A process where drafts must be approved by a reviewer or client before they can publish. It is how agencies and regulated teams keep mistakes off live accounts.

The rules that decide which touchpoint gets credit for a conversion. Attribution does not discover the truth, it applies a model you chose, and different models produce different winners.

How long after seeing or clicking an ad a conversion still gets credited to it — for example a 7-day click, 1-day view window. Widen the window and reported performance rises without anything really changing.

An audience is everyone a piece of content actually reaches and engages, a set that overlaps with but is not the same as an account's followers.

Awareness is how familiar a target audience is with a brand or product, built through repeated reach and typically judged over a period of months rather than a single campaign.

Based praises someone for holding an unpopular position openly, valuing the nerve more than the content, and carries a political charge in some contexts and none in others.

A benchmark is a reference figure, an industry average, a past period, a competitor, used to judge whether a current number is good, bad or typical.

A boomerang is a short burst of photo frames stitched together and played forward then backward in a loop, creating a repeating back-and-forth motion rather than a standard video clip.

An existing organic post you pay to show to more people, promoted from the post itself or the app rather than built in the ads manager.

The share of visits that ended without a second interaction. Social traffic bounces more than search traffic, so judge it against the channel it came from, not a single site-wide target.

A brand ambassador is a person who represents and promotes a brand on an ongoing basis, rather than through a single sponsored post, building familiarity with the brand over repeated appearances.

A brand mention is any post, comment, or message that references a brand, product, or account, whether or not it tags or links to it directly.

Brand safety is the practice of controlling what content an ad appears next to, so a brand is not shown alongside material that could damage how it is perceived.

The consistent personality and tone a brand writes in across every channel, usually written down as a short guide so different people sound like the same brand.

BTS ("behind the scenes") content shows the process, people or setting behind a finished product, event or piece of content rather than the polished result itself.

How often and on which days you publish to each channel. A cadence you can sustain beats a heavier one you abandon after a month.

A campaign is a set of posts and activity organized around one specific goal with a defined start and end date, distinct from an ongoing content pillar.

The written text published alongside a post. It carries the context, the voice and the call to action, and on most platforms it is also the searchable part of the post.

A single post containing several images or videos the viewer swipes through. Carousels typically earn more dwell time than one image because each swipe is another chance to re-engage.

Clickbait is a hook or headline that promises more than the content actually delivers, defined by the gap between the promise and the payoff rather than by how strong the hook itself is.

Comment moderation is the practice of removing spam, abuse and harassment from a post's comment section, distinct from deleting comments simply because they are critical.

Community guidelines are the rules a platform sets for what content and behavior are allowed, enforced through a mix of automated detection and human review that removes or restricts violating posts.

The day-to-day work of replying to comments, messages and mentions, and keeping the conversation around a brand healthy. It is distinct from publishing, and usually more predictive of loyalty.

A dated plan of what gets published, where and when, held in one place so the whole team can see the schedule instead of deciding each post on the day.

One of a handful of recurring themes a brand posts about, such as education, product, culture and customer stories. Pillars keep the feed varied and stop every post from being a sales message.

Re-publishing proven evergreen posts on a rotation instead of writing every post from scratch. Refresh the wording and imagery each cycle so the feed does not read as repetitive.

A tracked action you defined as valuable: a purchase, sign-up, download or lead form submission. What counts as a conversion is a choice you make, so define it before you measure it.

The share of people who completed the action you defined as valuable, such as a purchase or sign-up, out of those who had the chance to. Define the action before you measure the rate.

The -core suffix names a visual and emotional aesthetic, as in cottagecore or gorpcore, turning a mood into a searchable category people organise content around.

Cost per click: total ad spend divided by the number of clicks it produced. It prices the traffic you bought, where CPM prices the attention.

Cost per mille: what you pay for a thousand impressions. It is the standard way to compare the cost of attention across platforms and campaigns.

CPM is the cost of a thousand impressions and prices exposure; CPC is the cost of one click and prices an action. Click-through rate is what connects them.

A creator is someone whose product is the content itself, distinct from an influencer, whose product is access to an audience built around their personal presence.

The creator economy is the collection of businesses, tools, and income streams that let individual creators earn directly from an audience, through products, services, subscriptions, and platform payouts.

Cringe describes content that is embarrassing to watch because someone is visibly trying to be liked and missing, with the effort being the essential part.

Publishing the same content to several platforms at once. It saves time, but the result is stronger when the caption, format and aspect ratio are adapted per platform.

Call to action: the explicit instruction telling the reader what to do next, such as comment, save, sign up or open the link in the bio. A post without one usually gets what it asked for, which is nothing.

Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions, as a percentage. It measures how compelling the post is at driving the next step, independent of how many people saw it.

An ad that looks like a normal post but never appears on your profile or feed, shown only to the audience you target.

Dark social is traffic that arrives from a link shared privately, through DMs, group chats, or messaging apps, that shows up in analytics as direct traffic because it carries no referrer data.

Delulu is a playful clipping of delusional, warm and self-deprecating when applied to yourself and a mild criticism when applied to someone else.

A private one to one message between accounts on a platform, separate from public comments and increasingly where real customer conversations and content sharing happen.

A duet is a split-screen video format, most associated with TikTok, where a creator responds to or builds on another user's original video side by side.

A programme that equips employees to share company content from their own accounts. Personal accounts typically reach further than the brand page because their audiences are real networks.

Engagement is an umbrella term covering likes, comments, shares, saves and other interactions, but each platform defines and weights the bucket differently, making raw engagement numbers uncomparable across networks.

Posts that explicitly ask for likes, comments, shares, tags or votes to game distribution, which Meta and other platforms actively demote.

Interactions (likes, comments, shares, saves, clicks) divided by a base, usually reach or impressions, sometimes followers. Always state which base you used, because the three give very different numbers.

Reach counts unique people who saw a post; engagement counts the actions they took on it, so the two answer different questions and are only comparable as a rate.

An era, in the phrase "in my X era," frames a current phase of life as a chosen chapter with its own look and priorities, borrowed from music album cycles.

Content that stays accurate and useful long after publication, unlike news or trend-driven posts. It is the material worth re-sharing months later.

The Explore page is Instagram's recommendation feed that shows users posts from accounts they do not follow, chosen based on what they have engaged with before.

A feed is the scrollable stream of posts a platform shows a user, which on nearly every major platform is now ranked by predicted interest rather than shown in chronological order.

A finsta ("fake Instagram") is a private, smaller-audience secondary account someone uses for candid posts, separate from their main public profile.

A comment posted automatically right after the post itself, commonly used to park hashtags or a link so the caption stays clean.

A follower is someone who has subscribed to see an account's posts, but on a ranked feed a follow functions closer to a preference signal than a guarantee of being shown anything.

Follower growth is the net change in an account's follower count over a given period, typically reported as new follows minus unfollows.

Followers and subscribers both describe an opt-in to your content, but they differ in what delivery they guarantee and, on some platforms, in whether money changed hands.

FOMO ("fear of missing out") is the anxiety of being excluded from an experience others are having, and the emotional lever behind most urgency and scarcity marketing.

FR is short for "for real," used alone as agreement, inside a sentence as emphasis, and with a question mark to ask whether something is genuinely true.

The average number of times each person in your reach saw the ad, calculated as impressions divided by reach. It is the dial between being remembered and being resented.

The FYP (For You Page) is the personalized feed of recommended videos TikTok and other apps show each user, built by an algorithm rather than by who they follow.

A geotag is a location label attached to a post that ties it to a specific place, making it discoverable to people browsing or searching that location.

GRWM ("get ready with me") is a video format where a creator talks through their day, a topic or a story while filming themselves getting ready.

The unique @name that identifies an account on a platform, used in mentions and in the profile URL, and distinct from the display name you can change freely.

A keyword prefixed with # that turns a word into a clickable link to everything else using it. Hashtags now work more as topic labels for the ranking system than as a discovery feed people browse.

The opening line or first seconds of a post, written to stop the scroll and earn the next few seconds of attention. Everything after it only gets read if the hook works.

ICYMI ("in case you missed it") is a caption prefix used to resurface or reshare an older post for followers who did not see it the first time.

The number of times a post was displayed, counting repeats. One person who sees the same post three times generates three impressions but only one unit of reach.

An influencer brief is the document a brand sends a creator before a sponsored post, laying out the deliverables, key messages, and legal requirements for the collaboration.

Paying or partnering with creators to make and publish content about your product on their own accounts, borrowing their audience and their credibility.

Instagram stickers are interactive elements, like polls, questions, and quizzes, that can be added to a Story to prompt a direct response from viewers.

IRL ("in real life") marks something as happening in person and offline rather than on a platform, one of the oldest and most neutral pieces of internet shorthand.

IYKYK ("if you know, you know") is a caption or comment shorthand flagging a reference, joke or detail that only a specific in-group will understand.

A KPI (key performance indicator) is one of a small number of metrics an account or team has agreed to track as the measure of whether its goal is being met.

The single clickable URL on a profile, used on platforms where post captions are not linkable. It is usually pointed at a landing page listing several destinations.

A live stream is real-time video broadcast to an audience as it happens, distinct from pre-recorded video in that viewers can watch and often comment while it is still being filmed.

An ad audience the platform builds by finding users who resemble a source list you supply — customers, site visitors or engagers. Quality depends almost entirely on how good and how specific the source list is.

Lore is the accumulated backstory around a person, account or community: past events, running jokes and references that longtime followers know and newcomers do not.

Main character energy means living as the protagonist of your own story, warm encouragement when self-applied and an accusation of self-absorption when applied to someone else.

A meme is an image, video, phrase, or format that spreads by being copied and modified across many accounts, with each version referencing a shared, recognizable template.

A micro-influencer is a creator with a following commonly described as somewhere in the tens of thousands, known for a specific niche and typically higher engagement than larger accounts.

Mid means mediocre or unremarkable, a dismissal that is generally considered more cutting than calling something outright bad.

A nano-influencer is a creator with a small following, commonly described as under ten thousand, whose recommendations carry weight because their audience is largely made up of people who know them personally.

NGL ("not gonna lie") introduces a candid or mildly unflattering opinion, working as a softener at the start of a sentence rather than as an actual admission.

No cap means "no lie" or "seriously"; cap means a lie, and capping means lying. The phrase comes from African American Vernacular English and spread through hip-hop.

NPC ("non-player character") is a gaming term reused as an insult for someone seen as repeating scripted opinions without thinking, and separately the name of a TikTok Live performance format.

OOTD ("outfit of the day") is a photo or short-video format showing what someone is wearing, originally a hashtag and now the name for the whole outfit-post genre.

OP means "original poster," the person who started a thread, or sometimes "original post," the message that started it, used mainly on Reddit and other threaded discussions.

The number of unique accounts that saw a post without any money being spent to distribute it.

Organic social is distribution a platform gives a post for free based on its ranking signals; paid social is distribution you buy and target yourself.

The number of unique accounts that saw a post because money was spent to distribute it, reported separately from organic reach.

Paid social is advertising run through a platform's ad system, paying to place content in front of an audience beyond what it would reach organically.

A PFP ("profile picture") is the small image representing an account across a platform, shown in feeds, comments, search results and profile headers.

A photo dump is a carousel post combining a loose mix of photos and videos from a period of time, styled to feel casual rather than a single polished shot.

A pinned post is a post an account manually fixes to the top of its profile, keeping it visible above newer content regardless of when it was originally published.

Platform-native content is a post made to fit the specific format, pacing, and visual conventions of the platform it runs on, rather than the same file reused across several platforms.

POV ("point of view") is a caption label on short video that frames the clip as a scene the viewer is inside, though in casual use it often just introduces a relatable situation.

A profile visit is counted when someone taps through from a post, comment or search result to view an account's full profile page.

A set of recurring time slots per channel that scheduled posts drop into automatically, so you add content without picking a specific time for each one.

A quote post wraps someone else's post inside a new post of your own with added commentary, creating a separate post rather than forwarding the original unchanged.

W and L mean win and loss as verdicts on a post or action; "ratio" as a reply is an attempt to out-like the original post and prove it was unpopular.

Being "ratioed" means a post has drawn far more replies or quote posts than likes, usually read as a sign the post was unpopular or disagreed with.

The number of unique accounts that saw a post at least once. Reach is always lower than or equal to impressions; the gap between them tells you how often the average viewer saw it.

Reach counts the unique people who saw a post; impressions count every display of it, including repeats to the same person, so impressions are always the larger number.

A reaction is a quick, low-effort response to a post, a like, love, laugh, or similar preset option, that requires less deliberate choice than a comment or share.

A short vertical video format built for full-screen discovery feeds: Reels on Instagram and Facebook, Shorts on YouTube, and the main feed on TikTok. Distribution leans on interest matching rather than who follows you.

A repost is resharing someone else's content to a new audience, a different act from republishing your own content, and the one most likely to cause trouble without permission or credit.

Turning one piece of content into several, by reshaping it for a different format, platform or audience rather than republishing it unchanged.

Showing ads to people who already interacted with you — visited the site, watched a video, abandoned a cart. Also called remarketing; it usually converts far better than cold traffic.

Rizz means charisma in a specifically romantic or flirtatious sense, the skill of charming someone, and it has become the standard example of slang brand accounts misuse.

Return on ad spend: revenue generated divided by the ad spend that produced it, expressed as a ratio such as 4:1. Unlike ROI it ignores costs other than media.

Save rate is the share of viewers who bookmark a post to revisit later, measured against reach or impressions rather than followers.

Preparing a post in advance and setting a date and time for it to publish automatically. It separates the work of writing from the timing of delivery.

Sentiment analysis is the automated classification of mentions, comments or reviews as positive, negative or neutral, usually run at scale across large volumes of text.

An informal term for a sharp, unexplained drop in a post or account's distribution without a formal penalty notice. Most cases turn out to be ordinary ranking changes or a policy-limited topic rather than a hidden ban.

Your brand's share of all online conversation in your category, usually mentions about you divided by mentions about you plus your named competitors.

Simp is a pejorative for someone seen as giving excessive attention, money or deference to a person they are attracted to without reciprocation.

Social commerce is the ability to complete a purchase directly inside a social platform, without the shopper ever leaving the app to reach a separate checkout.

Monitoring public conversation for mentions of your brand, competitors and category, including posts that never tag you, to spot sentiment shifts, complaints and content ideas.

A social media manager is the person responsible for a brand's presence across its social accounts, covering content planning, posting, community response, and handling issues that surface publicly.

Social media monitoring is the practice of tracking mentions of your own brand, product, or account across platforms so you can respond to complaints and questions quickly.

A social media strategy is a plan defining who a brand is trying to reach, what action it wants from them, and which activities it will prioritize or stop doing to get there.

Users searching inside a social app — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube — instead of a web search engine. It makes clear, keyword-bearing captions and on-screen text worth writing deliberately.

A sponsored post is content a creator or account publishes in exchange for payment or product from a brand, with the paid relationship disclosed to the audience.

A stan is an intensely devoted fan of an artist, creator or franchise; as a verb, to stan something is simply to love it, in a much lighter sense.

A stitch is a TikTok format that clips a few seconds of someone else's video and attaches your own reaction or continuation to the front of it.

A full-screen vertical post that disappears after 24 hours, shown mainly to people who already follow you. Stories carry the casual, in-the-moment material that would not earn a place in the feed.

A subtweet is a post that is unmistakably about a specific person or brand without naming them, letting the target recognise themselves while the poster keeps deniability.

Sus is short for suspicious, used to flag a person, claim or situation as untrustworthy or slightly off, pushed into mass use by the game Among Us.

A tag is a link to another account attached to a specific part of a post, such as a photo or a location, that can place the post on the tagged account's own profile.

A target audience is the specific group of people a brand or account is trying to reach with its content, defined precisely enough to guide what gets made and where it gets shown.

TBT, short for Throwback Thursday, is a weekly posting convention where accounts share older photos, videos, or memories on Thursdays, usually marked with the hashtag itself.

A series of connected posts published in sequence so a longer argument or story fits a short-form feed. Common on X, Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon.

The still image that represents a video before anyone presses play. On platforms with a browsable grid it is the single biggest factor in whether a video gets opened at all.

A trend is a sound, format, meme, or topic that a large number of accounts adopt within a short window, usually because the platform's algorithm is actively pushing it to more viewers.

User-generated content: photos, videos or reviews created by customers rather than the brand. It reads as more credible than brand-made assets, but you need explicit permission before reposting it.

A vanity metric is a number that looks impressive and is easy to report, but does not connect to a decision anyone would actually make differently based on it.

The check mark on a profile. On some platforms it still signals a confirmed identity; on others it is now a paid subscription feature, so it no longer proves authenticity by itself.

Video completion rate is the percentage of viewers who watch a video all the way to the end, tracked as one signal among several for how well a video holds attention.

A play is a playback event; a view is whatever threshold a given platform has decided counts as one, which differs by platform and changes over time.

Viral content is a post that reaches far beyond an account's normal audience, typically because the algorithm keeps re-surfacing it to new viewers based on strong early engagement.

Watch time is the total number of minutes a video has been watched across all viewers, a cumulative figure rather than a per-viewer average.