The social media world is full of jargon. With the release of every new network comes a unique set of vocabulary to support the platform’s features and functionality. From’ tweet’ and ‘hashtag’ to ‘geotagging’ and ‘graph search’, keeping up with social media vernacular has become a true marketing challenge.

Whether you’re a rookie or veteran user, we’ve compiled a social media dictionary to help you achieve success in joining the conversation:

Beginner

• Avatar – Online image (typically a photo or illustration) associated with a user’s social media account
• Like – The act of publicly showing approval for a video, photo, or status update on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, or Instagram
• Hashtag – A word or phrase prefixed by the symbol # that is used on social networking services such as Twitter to group messages relating to a specific subject
• Tagged – To be mentioned in association with a specific post on a social network such as Facebook or Instagram
• Mention –Defined by the @ symbol being in front of a user’s Twitter handle as a way to engage a specific account

Intermediate

• Check In -The act of saying ‘I’m here’ by using geo-location capabilities that are integrated with social networks such as Foursquare and Facebook
• Bit.ly – Popular website used for generating shorter URLs that can be used for posting links on networks such as Twitter where characters are limited
• Vlog – A blog comprised of video entries rather than text
• Twitter Bomb – The process of flooding a Twitter feed by posting numerous tweets that have similar content from multiple accounts in order to promote a specific topic or idea
• Trending – Term used to describe subjects that are popular on Twitter at a specific point in time

Advanced

• Graph Search – Search engine integrated into Facebook’s new Social Graphs that draws information from user profiles in order to aggregate search results from across the network
• MT – On Twitter, MT stands for Modified Tweet meaning that a user has shortened an existing tweet in order to meet the character limitations
• Vine – Social networking service released in 2013 that allows users to record and share six second videos
• Geotagging – Process of adding location-based data to social media content including photos, videos, and status updates
• Crowdsourcing – Act of soliciting content, ideas, or skills form online users outside your organization

The world of social media is constantly changing and can be misleading with expectations for the next big thing. Focus on the outlets most important to your organization and take the time to learn the verbs and nouns of such. Doing so will not only improve your current social networking presence, but help lay the groundwork to evolve with future innovations.