Ever wondered what an RSS was? Or maybe you were a little fuzzy about a Disqus, or an App. It's ok - if nothing else, the web industry is really good at creating new words to represent their products and services. We've compiled some of Social Media's most trendy buzzwords into this easy-to-understand guide.
Social Media Terms Defined
Tweet
A Tweet, belonging to the popular micro-blogging service, Twitter, is also known as the activity of updating your status. For example, "Hey, did you see my latest Tweet?"
DM
A DM or Direct Message is a private message between two Twitter users. Use a DM when you want to keep your conversation private.
@ (at) Reply
An @ replay (at reply) is when one Twitter user publicly replies to another Twitter user or Tweet. An @ reply is characterized as having the @ placed before someones Twitter name. For example, if you were to send a message to @LevelTen_Colin, the reply would be sent to me.
Disqus
Disqus is a third party commenting system. It integrates with popular content management systems like Wordpress and Joomla to provide a more interactive and social media friendly way to comment on web content. After commenting, users have the ability to Tweet or share their comment on several popular social networks. Disqus also features an intuitive administration backend.
RSS Feed
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a publishing format that allows users to subscribe to website content that is regularly updated. RSS is used heavily in the blog circuit, but it has more wide reaching applications, such as social media listening.
Group Buying
Group Buying is a term that is generally used to describe websites like Groupon and Living Socially, which offer large discounts on a daily deal. Fueled by the success of category leader, Groupon, many more of these websites have begun operations in the last year.
Check In
A check-in is typically used to describe the process of announcing your physical location over a digital location based application, such as Foursquare or Whrrl.
App
An App is short for Application, and is usually used to describe applications that run on mobile or web platforms.
Mayor
A Mayorship is the award in Foursquare for checking in to a location more then anyone else. Mayorships for popular locations are often hotly contested, and some businesses offer specials and discounts for their mayors.
Geocaching
Geocaching is used to describe a game, much like hide and seek, in which containers (caches) are hidden and can only be found using GPS devices. The concept has been repeated online and in mobile apps. One of the most recognizable applications is Gowalla's use of social objects which can be received upon check-in at a particular location.
Tagging
Tagging is the act of associating a relevant word or phrase with a piece of content. Tagging helps to organize content around relevant topics. This can also help from a search engine optimization standpoint, creating topically organized landing pages for the search engines.
Friend
In the digital world, a friend is someone that you have digitally connected with. This may or may not include offline interaction. Friend is mostly used for the social networking website, Facebook.
Like
A Like is Facebook term that is used to describe the action of positively endorsing a piece of Facebook content. This is mostly used for Facebook pages and status updates. In general, the more Likes you receive, the better.
Badge
A badge is a popular reward for users of many location based mobile applications. Badges came to the forefront of the digital world with their use in Foursquare. Users receive badges for completing certain tasks within the application.
Location Based Marketing
Location based marketing is the act of marketing through location based applications. While the location based marketing is still in the process of emerging, many opportunities for businesses have been presented, such as location specials, coupons, and other tactics.
Hashtag
A hashtag, frequently used in Twitter, is a means for creating an organized discussion across many individual tweets. In Twitter's early days, hashtags were also used as a method for search. Today, they're mostly used around time based events such as sports, conferences, and digital chats. A hashtag is written as #YourTag.
Geo-targeting
The concept of geo-targeting applies to focusing your marketing campaigns around a specific geographic target. For example, if most of my target customers lived in Dallas, Texas, I'd want to geo-target my campaigns to Dallas, rather then spending wasted money on locations that aren't relevant to our target.
API
API stands for Application Programing Interface. An API simply allows for a skilled programmer to get two pieces of software to interact. APIs are useful when you want to collect custom data, or, build custom functionality into a piece of software.
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is the act of using a crowd to accomplish a task that would take an individual much longer to do. While Crowdsourcing has many wide-reaching applications, in social media, this is a popular tactic to use for research and feedback.
Have you heard any other terms that were bandied about in a recent social media conversation? Leave them in the comments and I'll add it to the post!
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