The social marketing community – just like any other industry in the online or offline world – has it’s own jargon. If you want to make a social media marketing plan for your business and you want to be efficient, you need to know and to understand these terms and concepts. Here is a small collection with the most important terms you should know most important terms you should know

A

A/B testing (or split testing); useful method to test, analyze and compare the conversion rates obtained with two different graphical, structural, etc versions of the same offer (e. g. testing two different marketing copies or two different email templates).

Above the fold; the upper section of a web page which is completely visible without scrolling.

Advertiser (or merchant); the party who has the products or services that you can promote as an affiliate.

AFAIK; As Far As I Know.

Affiliate (or publisher); an independent individual who agrees to promote products or services for an advertiser in exchange for a well defined reward.

Affiliate ID; a unique identifier included in your affiliate link and used to track your personal performance.

Affiliate link; a special URL provided by the advertiser and associated with a given affiliate; contains a unique tracking code that can register and measure the performance of the given affiliate.

Affiliate network; an external third party who basically works as an intermediary between advertisers and publishers, providing the necessary technical platform and complete packages of management services for both sides.

Affiliate program; a performance-oriented partnership between a merchant (advertiser) and an independent individual promoter (affiliate). The advertiser agrees to share the profit with the affiliates in exchange for generating certain qualified actions, usually sales.

Avatar; an icon, image or figure used to represent a given person in an online community (game, blog, forum, etc).

B

Bio; short for biography; important piece of your online profile used to explain to new or potential followers who you are.

Blog; a regularly updated website aiming a specific target group and containing chronological publications, articles on personal or individual thoughts.

Brand advocate; a customer or a person who talks favorably about a given brand.

Brandjacking; the act of hijacking a brand. The brandjacker will assume and exploit the targeted brand’s identity in order to undermine the brand.

C

Caption; a brief description underneath an Instagram photo.

Chatbots; tiny computer programs integrated in popular messaging apps (e. g. Facebook Messenger) used to simulate conversations with human users.

Circles; a way to sort, filter, categorize Google+ contacts by various criteria (interest, location, etc). They allow you to share different content with different categories of people (circles).

Click-through rate ( or CTR); a metric used to measure the level of interest; if a link displayed 100 times has received 2 clicks, it means a CTR of 2%.

Clickbait; an eye-catching hyperlink, a sensationalist headline or a misleading content piece which encourages people to click through to the full content. Usually has only one goal: to generate page views or advertising revenue.

Cloaking; hiding certain content on webpages or in affiliate links. The former method is considered to be a black hat technique that will damage your SEO efforts; the latter is a useful, widely accepted and used practice in affiliate marketing.

Contextual link; a link which is literally included, incorporated in the main content of a web page as a usual underlined textual link. The opposite is some sort of traditional advertisement displayed within various secondary structural elements (header, sidebar, etc) in form of textual or image links.

Conversion; the fulfillment of a desired, well-defined action or objective as a result of a given marketing message or strategy (e. g. a new sale, a new subscriber, etc).

Conversion rate (or CR); a metric used to measure the efficiency level; if a link displayed 100 times has generated 3 sales, it means a CR of 3%.

Conversion rate optimization (or CRO); the sum of all the efforts and practices that are used to increase the number of those visitors who will take a specific decision or desired action once they have arrived on a website.

Copywriting; the act of writing compelling and engaging textual content that will be used as a marketing asset in order to generate a certain customer behavior.

Cover photo; large, horizontal – and usually branded – public image at the top of your Facebook page or profile.

Co-branding; the merchant offers certain self-branding opportunities to the affiliate. Usually these are special creatives (e. g. squeeze page) containing branding elements (e. g. logos) for both the advertiser and the publisher.

Creatives; textual or graphical marketing aids or materials provided by the merchant. They are used by affiliates on their own websites to generate the desired actions (e. g. banners).

Creeping; spending a huge amount of time looking trough someone’s social media profile.