Social Media Glossary

A basic overview of commonly used words and acronyms in the social media industy.

Aggregator – An aggregator is a place where content is pulled from multiple sources, and presented/consolidated in one place.

Avatar – An avatar is an online representation of the user, usually in the form of an icon or picture.

Blog – A blog, like our search engine blog, is a type of website that contains personal commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.

Buzz Monitoring – Buzz (social media) monitoring means keeping tabs on discussions relevant to a brand/product/service happening across social media sites around the web for analytical purposes.

Digg – Digg is a community based, news article website, where people can share links and stories from around the web.

Delicious – Delicious (del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking website, for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks.

Facebook – Facebook is an online community, where people can interact and network with friends and strangers, share content, play games and more.

Feed – A feed is a data format that distributes frequently updated content to users.

FeedBurner – FeedBurner is a web based tool which provides custom RSS feeds and other tools for bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers.

Feed Reader – A feed reader allows for frequently updated (syndicated) content to be collated in one location for easy viewing.

Forum – A forum (or message board) is an online discussion site where users can send, read and reply to messages on a particular subject.

Flickr – Flickr is an image and video hosting website.

Keyword Cloud – A keyword cloud is a group of related key terms based on a website, whereby the term’s size in the group denotes it’s popularity.

Permalink – A permalink is a permanent link to a piece of content, which could take various forms such as blog posts, audio, news item etc.

Podcast – A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually either audio or video, that is made available for download via web syndication.

RSS – RSS (most commonly said to be an acronym for ‘Really Simple Syndication’) is an XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites.

Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking allows web resources to be shared, categorised, searched and managed, similar to Favourites on a web browser.

Social Media – Social media is content created by people (eg. opinions, insights, reviews, videos, audio) and shared in a social environment (eg. Facebook, Twitter, forums, blogs).

Social Networking – Social networking is the term used to describe the online interaction between a group of people who share a common interest.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) – Social media marketing is pursuing branding and marketing goals through the participation in various social media sites and applications.

Social Media Optimisation (SMO) – Social media optimisation (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites.

Stumbleupon – StumbleUpon is an internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos.

Tag Cloud – See Keyword Cloud

Trackback – A trackback is a notification that can be received when someone links to your content.

Twitter – Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates, known as tweets.

User-generated content (UGC) – User-generated content (UGC) is any content that is created by end-users for others.

URL Shortener – A URL shortener is a tool/website that generates temporary, shorter versions of a URL that can then be re-used elsewhere.

Web 2.0 – Web 2.0 is a term that is used to describe the second generation of web services and applications, with increased emphasis on human collaboration/interaction.

Widget – A widget is a third party object that can be embedded in a website, and usually involves user interaction.

Wiki – A wiki is a website or similar online resource which allows users to add and edit content collectively.

Wordpress – Wordpress is a free, open-source blog publishing system, which is customisable and can be adapted for different uses.

YouTube – YouTube is a video sharing website, which allows for users to upload, share, watch and rate video content.