Social Media Terms from A to Z

A: Aggregate – Aggregating content is the act of gathering information from across the web and making it available in one place. Example:

B: Blogoshere – Where all the blogs live on the Internet and where all the conversation happening around them.

BizBuzz – Syracuse Social Network.   Social media network’s twitter hash tag ( # ). Type #bizbuzz on Twitter to see the results

C: Crowdsourcing – Pulling together the expertise and enthusiasm of those outside your organization who can voluntarily contribute content, create products, and solve problems for you.

C: Captcha – an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Captcha’s are often used to help separate humans from spam robots when leaving comments on a blog.

D: del.icio.us & Digg – Popular social bookmarking sites that enable users to store, share, and organize their favorite web sites and web pages.

E: Engagement – be an active participant online. Engage with blogs by leaving comments, share information with friends on social sites like Facebook, and tweet and retweet your followers on Twitter.

F: Facebook – a popular social networking site where users can create profiles, add friends, share photos and communicate with a select group of people. Users can become “fans” of organizations, people, and other entities. Users can also join groups and enter networks organized by schools, workplaces, or location.

G: Groundswell – a fast and spontaneous social trend that gathers force and influences public opinion.

H: Hyper-local – news coverage on a smaller, local, community level than is usually provided by regional news outlets. Also known as “narrow-interest” news.

H: Hashtag – Hashtags can be used to organize conversations around a particular event or a popular topic of conversation on Twitter. By organizing tweets around a hashtag, users following and participating in a conversation can find all Tweets about that subject. Ex. #socialmediaa-z

I: Influencer – a person that is recognized in the online community as someone who affects others’ thoughts and opinions. An Influencer is generally sought out for his/her expertise and knowledge in a specific subject area.

J: Join – join conversations and discussions online. Share information and be an active participant in social media sites.

K: Keep it simple – ‘nuff said.

L: LinkedIn – is a social and business networking site used primarily by professionals for organizing and connecting with business contacts.

M: Micro Blogging – a form of blogging that consists of extremely brief updates such as text messages, Tweets, photos, or audio or video clips.

N: Network – a set of connections or a group of people that a user sets up consisting of other people with similar interests.

O: Online Community – a group of individuals who share common interests and use the internet to communicate, network, and share information with each other.

P: Participate – To make the most of social media, you need to participate. Share your ideas and connect with people by participating in conversations online.

Q: Quick – Social media is quick and agile. It doesn’t take a lot of time to get involved.

R: Retweet – rebroadcasting or resending a twitter message that someone else sent.

S: Share – share links, feeds, videos etc… by posting them to your Facebook, Twitter, blog, or other social media site.

T: Twitter – Twitter is a free social media site that gives users a way to engage in “micro-blogging,” with a large online community in short, 140-character-or-less, messages.

U: UGC – User-generated content (UGC) refers to various kinds of media content that is produced by the audience or user and shared publicly. An example of UGC are videos posted to YouTube.

V: Viral Marketing – Viral marketing is when an idea or concept is spread by word-of-mouth instead of traditional paid advertising or marketing avenues. When something goes viral in social media, it is shared repeatedly and spread around by users taking on a life of it’s own.

W: Widgets – portable web code that can be posted, shared, and installed on any HTML-based web site by anyone without requiring any additional sets of programs.

X: XML – is an acronym for “Extensible Markup Language”. XML is a popular set of rules used to electronically code documents so that they can be used for RSS feeds.

Y: YouTube – YouTube is a popular online video community that allows users to easily upload and share videos.

Z: Zip – $0, nada, zero, nil. The monetary cost of using most social media tools. Especially if they come from PBS!