Jargon Busters – Mosh’s Guide to Social Media Terms

As a given, the world of social media comes with a bunch of acronyms and jargon that most of the time just looks like a jumbled string of words that don’t make much sense. To us, these words don’t seem as confusing, but that’s because we’re surrounded by it. Every. Day. We’re here to act as your modern day ghost-busters and give you a quick and easy A-Z guide to take the guesswork out of all this social media jargon.

Naturally, we are going to list everything in alphabetical order, maybe you’d like to read through everything. Or you can do the classic Command ⌘ + F to find exactly what you’re looking for. (Or Control + F, no judgement here.) We’ve got a mixture of Facebook and general social media jargon going on here, so let’s dive in.

Action – This is the number of “actions” that are taken on your ad, whether that be page likes, conversions, app installs, the list goes on. All these different types of interactions are summed up as one lump sum that we call actions.

Ad – An ad is one singular advertisement, that usually lives inside an adset which in turn lives inside a campaign.

Adset – Adsets live within one campaign, which include multiple ads, the budget, and the schedule. With every adset, there is one budget, however if CBO is enabled, that changes the budget settings, and you’ll find out what those are just a couple letters down.

Bid – A bid is the amount that you ‘bid’ in an ad auction, so the higher you bid, the higher the probability that a person will make an action upon seeing the ad. In turn, the lower you bid, the lower your opportunities.

Bitmoji – This is an app that people use to create an avatar that looks like themselves. These bitmojis can be used across social media as their own personal emoji.

Bitly – You’ll see this around plenty, it’s a free service where anyone can shorten a link if it looks too long and messy in a post.

Campaign – This is the mother bear of ads, a campaign is the structure that keeps adsets and ads together in harmony. When your ads and adsets are within a campaign, you can control the objective of that campaign.

CBO – This means Campaign Budget optimisation, this guy automatically manages the budget for your campaign to get you the best results. Usually this is set as default, which can be changed to something manual.
Community Manager – This is the person responsible for managing the online community built on a social media platform. For example, they are at the front line of communication between the brand and the fan.

Conversion Rate – We know what this is in retail. It’s very similar, but it’s the percentage of those who viewed a post or ad and completed an action. So that may be clicking a link, filling out a form, the list goes on.

CPC – Cost per click, pretty similar to our friend above us. But this one is per click, so each time someone clicks on us the CPC is the amount you have elected each time that happens.

CPM – The acronym directly translates to ‘cost per mile.’ But in relation to Facebook, this is the cost per 1,000 impressions.

Crowdsourcing – Gathering ideas from your customers or fans from social media to gain a better understanding of the pertaining audience.

Daily/Lifetime Budget – Daily budgets are the amount that you’ve allocated to spend on an adset on a daily basis, a lifetime budget means that you set a start and end date. The budget that you’ve allocated to that period of time will be distrubed for that lifetime, and will end at the specified end date.

Delivery – This is a section you’ll see in the Ads Manager, this column tells you if your campaign or adset is active or not. These are the four statuses that you’ll see under ‘Delivery’ Active, Paused, Completed, or Not Running.

Frequency – This is the average number of times that a singular ad has been shown to a person.

Facebook Pixel – This is a magical little piece of code that enables the chance to remarket to people through Facebook that have viewed a website directed from a search engine.

Facebook Business Manager – This is the Holy Grail of Facebook, this is where you can have managing access to your Pages and ad accounts.

Link Clicks – This is the amount of times that a link has been clicked, specifically those that are attributed to an ad, or your Page. This link needs to direct people off of Facebook. For example, a link to a website, or an app installation link.

Objective – This is the goal for your specific ad. Whichever objective you choose, it will always be that chosen objective.

Page Engagement – The total amount of actions that people took with your Facebook Page and the posts within, in relation to an ad.

Page Likes – This is the number of likes that you get on your Page as an outcome of your active ads.

Post Engagement – The total amount of actions that people took in relation to ads, or posts.

Placement – This is where you can select ads to appear, for example there’s placements like the news feed, video feed, etc.

Relevance Score – This is a rating from 1 to 10 that estimates how well your selected audience is responding to a specific ad.

Remarketing – We just mentioned this before, but what is it? It allows marketers to display ads to those who have visited their website that has a Facebook Pixel. There is also remarketing where if someone fills out a form and includes a email address, that email address can be opted in for remarketing, say for marketing emails.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation is used to increase the amount of unpaid traffic to a website using search engines like Google, or Bing. That’s when that awesome little Facebook pixel comes into play when someone visits a site, then it gives social media a chance to remarket the brands that someone Googled… or Binged (Still, no judgement here.)

Social Proof – This is the name for general engagement on an ad, so mainly likes, comments, and shares.

Status – This can be On, or Off. This refers to the Status of your campaigns, and adsets. You need to make sure that it’s switched on before it can run.

Thread – This is a string of comments that are left on a post. Usually a thread starts with one person, then someone replies, then someone replies after that, etc.

UGC – This stands for User Generated Content, which could be photos, videos, posts that are created by consumers or fans of a product or service. It’s a great opportunity for marketers to connect with their audience to support a campaign that might be running at the time.

If you’re reading this, you’ve made it to the end. Give yourself a pat on the back, because now you know more about social media. There’s lots of jargon to unwrap here, but since we live and breathe social media- we’re glad to make it a little bit easier to understand for you.