Social Media Glossary

Whether you're working with an in-house team member or an external agency, understanding common social media terms can help you navigate the results for your business and improve your digital marketing. Use our easy Social Media Glossary to learn the language!

Platform

A platform is the "brand" of social media being used. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are all different platforms.

Channel

A channel is the specific page for your business. Think of it like a television channel - a dedicated space for your content to be scheduled and distributed. For example, the Tomahawk channel is https://business.facebook.com/TomahawkTourism on the Facebook platform.

Likes

When a person clicks on your post with the pre-generated response. This feature has recently been expanded to a range of “emotions” so users can express joy, anger, sadness and laughter to engage with your content.

Shares

When someone clicks "share" on your post, it's delivered to their entire friends network through the news feed, drastically increasing your reach at no additional cost. This metric is included in Organic Reach (see term below.)

Engagement

This statistic includes all likes, comments, clicks and shares for a post. This data is collected whenever someone interacts with your post.

Reach

The number of users content is “delivered” (shown) to via the News Feed.

Impressions – This number includes any time a user sees your post on their news feed. This number is always much higher than engagement, because users can see your content without clicking or commenting on the post. A high number of impressions is most useful for brand awareness.

Boost

Payment to Facebook to deliver your post to more people, delivered to your current fans or to a target demographic.

Brand Awareness

Getting your name and messages out there to your target audiences. This is the most efficient and cost effective use of your social media efforts. Use this objective to reach people who have never heard of you, in your target demographics.

Organic Reach

The number of people who see your post/content without any ad spend involved. This can be increased when you post quality images and relevant information, making it less expensive to deliver your messages to the right people. Facebook’s algorithm prioritises quality content based on images, copy and not sending people “outside” the platform to other websites.

Paid Reach

Paying money to boost your content. Facebook will guarantee delivery to an increased number of people, shown as an estimate at the time of boosting. (Showing the post in their news feed as “sponsored.”) This is the number of people Facebook has shown your content to for the spend.

CPC – Cost Per Click

This is how much you’ve spent for every person who has clicked on your post. Most useful statistic for Click to Website campaigns, driving traffic to your website.

ROI

Getting a solid return on investment is measured by the value of what you spend on your social advertising compared to each sale. Social media works best as brand awareness, leading to future sales, but can also lead to direct sales when used strategically on the right products.