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Social Media Glossary

Use this handy glossary of social media terms and definitions to better understand the ins and outs of social media.

Aggregation

Bringing together content from disparate and independent communities online. The results may be displayed in an aggregator website like Google Reader or directly on your desktop using software often also called a newsreader.

Archive

A storage for content no longer considered in active use on a community. Often times, older topics on forums or historical content on blogs are placed into storage that is simply a couple of clicks away. Other communities, like Twitter, will store data that is older in places you cannot access. You may still be able to comment on archived items, when available.

Avatars

Graphical images representing people. They are what you are in virtual worlds. You can build a visual character with the body, clothes, behaviors, gender and name of your choice. It may or may not be an authentic representation of yourself.

Blogs

Short for weblogs or web logs. User-generated sites where entries are made in a journalistic style such as Engadget, Autoblog, Blogspot.com, WordPress.com and Gizmodo.

Blogroll

A list of sites displayed in the sidebar of a blog showing who the blogger reads regularly.

Bookmarking

Saves the address of a website or item of content either in your browser or on a social bookmarking site. If you add tags, others can easily use your research or referenced links, and the social bookmarking site becomes an enormous repository for categories of information for later retrieval.

Browser

Also known as a Web browser. It is a tool used to view the web. Common browsers used include Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Bulletin Boards

The early vehicles for online collaboration, where users connected with a central computer to post and read email-like messages in a threaded, conversation based format. They were the electronic equivalent of public notice boards. The term is still used interchangeably for forums.

Chat

Interaction on a website, with a number or people adding text items one after the other into the same space at almost the same time. Chat rooms differ from forums in that conversations in chat rooms happen in near real-time. There are usually no recorded logs of the chat.

Comments

Blogs, news and other mainstream sites may allow readers to add remarks and comments under items.

Communities

Also known as online communities or virtual communities. Communities are groups of people that communicate through the Internet and share mutual interests or goals. For example, there are communities around dog owners and home chefs. While communities generally emerge organically, some community-building is necessary if there are specific goals to achieve.

Content

In the social media monitoring space, the term content is generally used to describe text, pictures, video or any other meaningful material that is on the Internet.

Crowdsourcing

Refers to harnessing the skills and enthusiasm of a loosely connected organization of people who are prepared to volunteer their time contributing content and solving problems.

Facilitator

Someone who helps people in an online group or forum manage their conversations. They may help agree on a set of rules, draw out topics for discussion, gently keep people on topic and summarize, and ensure the community rules are followed.

Feeds

Are the means by which you can read, view or listen to items from blogs and other enabled sites without visiting the site by subscribing and using an aggregator or newsreader. Feeds contain the content of an item and any associated tags without the design or structure of a web page.

Folksonomy

Taxonomies are centralized ways of classifying information as in libraries. Folksonomy is a system of classification that is user-driven and also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing and social tagging.

Forums

Are discussion areas on websites where people can post messages or comment on existing messages asynchronously—that is, independently of time or place. Chat is the synchronous equivalent. Before blogs developed, email lists and forums were the main means of conversing online. These communities are the evolution of bulletin boards, but are often mentioned synonymously today.

Friends

On social sites, friends are contacts whose profile you link to in your profile. On some sites people have to accept the link, in others, these links are more open.

Groups

Collections of individuals with some sense of unity through their activities, interests or values. They are often explicit lists of people: you are in a group, or not. Usually, groups reside within larger social communities and networks that help the community define specific areas of discussion without needing to create pairwise friend connections between each member.

Keywords

(social media monitoring usage) In social media keywords are search terms that are used to bring back potentially relevant content from an indexed set of data. Keywords can be an index term, subject term, subject heading or descriptor that is used to retrieve information from the social Web. In Visible Intelligence, keywords are used in Saved Searches to define the type of social media content users would like to see in the results set.

Klog

Short for knowledge blog, klog is a type of blog used as an internal/Intranet blog that is not accessible to the general public and that serves as a knowledge management system. The term is also used to describe a blog that is usually technically oriented.

Links

Are the highlighted text or images that, when clicked, jump you from one web page or item of content to another. Bloggers use links a lot when writing to reference their own or other content. Linking is another aspect of sharing, by which you offer content that may be linked and acknowledge the value of other people’s contributions by linking to them.

Lurkers

Are people who read but don’t contribute or add comments to forums. The one percent rule-of-thumb suggests about one percent of people contribute new content to an online community, another nine percent comment and the rest lurk. However, this may not be a passive role because content read on forums may spark interaction elsewhere.

Mashups

The digital equivalent of a remix. In social media, mashups generally refer to sites that reuse content and functions from a number of other sites and repurpose / re-visualize the same information in new and interesting ways. The repurposing of the content may or may not be aligned to the original goals of the component sites.

Message Boards

Message Boards are another synonymous term to bulletin boards and forums.

Microblog

Microblogging is a form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically much smaller due to imposed constraints. A microblog entry could consist of nothing but a short sentence fragment, or an image or embedded video. A good example of this is Twitter with its 140 character limit.

Newsreader

Is a website or desktop tool that acts as an aggregator, gathering content from blogs and similar sites using RSS feeds so you can read the content in one place, instead of having to visit different sites.
Permalink

The permanent, unique address (URL) of an item of content, such as a blog post. This link should take you directly to the article or content, rather than the homepage of the site where it is published.

Petabyte

An absurdly large amount of data equivalent to a million gigabytes. For example, Google processes approximately 24 petabytes of data per day while Facebook processes around 24 terabytes per day.

Photosharing

Is uploading your images to a website like Flickr and Picasa to share with either public or private audiences. You can add tags and offer people the opportunity to comment or even re-use your photos if you add an appropriate copyright license.

Podcast

Is audio or video content that can be downloaded automatically through a subscription to a website so you can view or listen offline.

Post

A single article or content published by a person.

Profiles

Are the information that you provide about yourself when signing up for a social networking site. As well as a picture and basic information, this may include your personal and business interests, a “blurb” about yourself and tags to help people search for like-minded people.

Reviews

Reviews are posts that are made on product or service-related websites, which are similar to Message Boards and Blogs but designed to establish a public viewpoint on a particular place or thing. Reviews are divided into two categories: Professional and Consumer reviews. Professional Reviews are generally unbiased and written by staff members at a website; consumer reviews are written and posted by end-users. While consumer reviews are generally more subjective and based on personal opinion and experience, they are invaluable for understanding consumer perceptions.

RSS

Short for Really Simple Syndication. This allows you to subscribe to content on blogs and other social media and have it delivered to you through a feed.

Social Media

Social media is a term for the tools and platforms people use to publish, converse and share content online. The tools include blogs, wikis, podcasts and sites to share photos and bookmarks. Social networking sites are online places where users can create a profile for themselves and then socialize with others using a range of social media tools including blogs, video, images, tagging, lists of friends, forums and messaging.

Social Network

A social network is a social structure made of individuals (or organizations), which are tied together by one or more specific types of mutual interest such as friendship, kinship, likes, dislike, etc. Users in social networks generally link to each other by accepting invitations to connect or “friend” each other.

Tags

Keywords attached to a blog post, bookmark, photo or other item of content so you and others can find them easily through searches and aggregation. Tags can usually be freely chosen and are part of a folksonomy, while categories are predetermined and are part of a taxonomy.

Taxonomy

Is an organized way of classifying content in a fixed set of categories related to each other in a hierarchy. Providing contributors to a site with a set of categories can be hierarchical (taxonomy) or non-hierarchical (ontology).

Terms of Service

The basis on which you agree to use a forum or other web-based place for creating or sharing content.

Threads

Strands of conversation found throughout social media. Threads may be comment oriented (an original article with commentary) or discussion oriented (back and forth content directed at particular individuals).

Thumbcasting

Creating social media content from a mobile device or phone.

Trackback

Some blogs provide a facility for other bloggers to leave a calling card automatically, instead of commenting. Blogger A may write on blog A about an item on blogger B’s site, and through the trackback facility leave a link on B’s site back to A. The collection of comments and trackbacks on a site facilitates conversations.

URL

Unique Resource Locator is the technical term for a web address like http://www.bbc.co.uk.

User Generated Content

User generated content is text, photos and other material produced by the masses of people online. Unlike more traditional content that is published, edited, and managed through organizational processes, user generated content is created by anyone and everyone online.

Wall

Shared discussion specifically about an individual and displayed on the individual profile. For example, you may have seen the Facebook Wall on individual or group profile sites.”

Web 2.0

A broad term to describe the increasingly interactive and collaborative nature of the web. Before Web 2.0, you needed a web developer to create and share content online. Nowadays, content is easier to create than consume.

Widget

A stand-alone application that can be embedded elsewhere on the web. One of the simplest of these is the YouTube video sharing widget that you can embed on any html page, whether it’s a blog, your homepage, or a forum comment.

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