Glossary

Social media, defined.

Every term, metric, and acronym you'll hit doing social — in plain English, with the context that actually matters. 47 definitions and counting, cross-linked to the guides and tools that put them to work.

MetricsContentStrategyGrowthPlatformsTechnical
Metrics
Click-through rate (CTR)
The percentage of people who saw a post or link and clicked it: clicks ÷ impressions × 100.
Conversion rate
The percentage of people who completed a desired action — signup, purchase, subscribe — after engaging.
CPM (cost per mille)
The cost of one thousand ad impressions — the standard way paid social pricing is quoted.
Engagement rate
The share of an audience that interacts with a post — likes, comments, shares and saves divided by followers or reach, as a percentage.
Impressions
The total number of times a post was displayed, including repeat views by the same person.
Reach
The number of unique people who saw a post at least once.
Sentiment analysis
Classifying the emotional tone of mentions and comments — positive, negative or neutral — usually at scale.
Share of voice (SOV)
Your brand's share of the total conversation about a topic or category, relative to competitors.
Vanity metrics
Numbers that look impressive but don't map to business outcomes — follower count, total likes, raw impressions.
Content
Caption
The written text accompanying a post or image — the body copy that carries the message after the hook lands.
Carousel
A multi-card post users swipe through horizontally — multiple images or slides in a single shareable unit.
Evergreen content
Content that stays relevant and useful long after it's published, rather than expiring with a news cycle or trend.
Hook
The opening line or first few seconds of a post, written to stop the scroll and earn the rest of the attention.
Permalink
The permanent, canonical public URL of a single post — the stable address you link to and share.
Reel
A short, vertical, looping video format — Instagram's answer to TikTok — built for discovery beyond your followers.
Story
A full-screen, vertical post that disappears after 24 hours — casual, frequent, and shown mostly to existing followers.
Thread
A connected series of short posts published as one chain, used to tell a longer story within a microblogging platform.
User-generated content (UGC)
Content created by your customers or audience rather than your brand — reviews, photos, testimonials, mentions you can reshare.
Strategy
Brand voice
The consistent personality and tone of how a brand communicates — the difference between sounding like you and sounding generic.
Call to action (CTA)
The explicit ask in a post that tells people what to do next — reply, sign up, click, share.
Content calendar
A schedule of what you'll post, where, and when — so publishing is planned ahead instead of scrambled daily.
Content pillar
A recurring theme or topic bucket your content keeps returning to, so a feed stays focused instead of random.
Content repurposing
Reshaping one piece of content into multiple formats — a blog post becomes a thread, a carousel, and several short posts.
Cross-posting
Publishing the same or adapted content across multiple platforms, ideally tailored to each rather than copy-pasted.
Posting cadence
How often and how regularly you publish — the rhythm of your posting, e.g. three times a week, every weekday.
Social proof
Evidence that other people value you — testimonials, reviews, user counts, mentions — used to build trust with new audiences.
Growth
Algorithm (social media)
The ranking system that decides which posts each person sees and in what order, based on predicted engagement.
Build in public
Sharing your product's progress, metrics, and decisions openly as you build — turning the journey into an audience.
Engagement bait
Content that begs for interaction — "tag a friend," "comment YES" — to game the algorithm rather than earn it.
Influencer
A person with an engaged audience and the credibility to sway their followers' opinions and buying decisions.
Organic reach
The number of unique people who saw your content without paid promotion — purely through the platform's distribution.
Paid reach
The number of unique people who saw your content because you paid to promote it — boosted posts and ads.
Shadowban
When a platform quietly limits a post or account's distribution without telling you — your reach drops but nothing looks wrong.
Social selling
Using social media to build relationships and trust that lead to sales — without hard-pitching in every post.
Platforms
ActivityPub
The open standard that lets independent social servers exchange posts, follows and replies — the protocol underpinning Mastodon and Threads federation.
AT Protocol
An open social networking protocol built around portable accounts and domain-based handles — the technology behind Bluesky.
Community management
The ongoing work of replying, moderating and nurturing relationships with an audience — the human side of social, not the broadcasting.
Fediverse
A network of independent, interconnected social servers that talk to each other over shared protocols, so accounts on different platforms can follow and reply across them.
Handle
The @username that identifies an account on a platform — the public name people tag, mention and link to.
Link in bio
The single clickable link a profile allows, used to route followers to a site, landing page or list of destinations.
Microblogging
Posting short, frequent text updates to a public feed — the format of X, Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads.
Technical
API
An application programming interface — the contract that lets one piece of software talk to another, like posting to a platform in code.
Hashtag
A keyword prefixed with # that tags a post to a topic, making it discoverable to people following or searching that term.
Open Graph
A metadata standard that controls how a link previews when shared — the title, description and image that appear in the card.
Social media scheduling
Queuing posts in advance to publish automatically at set times, so content ships on a plan instead of in the moment.
UTM parameters
Tags appended to a link's URL that tell your analytics which post, platform or campaign sent each visitor.
Webhook
A reverse API call — a platform sends your app a message the instant an event happens, instead of you having to poll for it.

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