Social Media Terms

An affiliate creator is a social media creator who earns a commission on sales rather than a flat fee for posting. They promote a product using a tracked link or discount code, and...

Algorithm signals are the pieces of behavioural data a social platform's ranking system reads to decide who sees a piece of content and how far it spreads. Signals include watch ti...

Amplification rate is the percentage of your audience that shares or reposts your content, calculated as total shares divided by total followers or reach, multiplied by 100. It mea...

Applause rate is the percentage of people who reacted positively to a social post, calculated as the number of likes and reactions divided by total followers or reach. It measures...

Average View Duration (AVD) is the average length of time viewers spend watching a video, calculated as total watch time divided by total views. It's a core retention metric on pla...

Best time to post refers to the idea that posting on social media at a specific hour or day increases reach and engagement. In practice, most platforms now prioritise content based...

A boosted post is an organic social media post you pay to show to a wider or more targeted audience, usually through a single button on Facebook or Instagram. It's the simplified v...

A brand ambassador is a person, often a customer, employee or public figure, who represents a brand consistently over an extended period rather than for a single paid post. The rel...

A carousel is a social media post format made up of multiple images or slides that a user swipes through in a single post. Common on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook, it lets a bra...

Comment rate is the percentage of people who leave a comment after seeing a social media post, calculated as comments divided by reach or followers. It measures how much a post pro...

Community management is the practice of building, growing and nurturing relationships with your audience across social media, forums, groups and owned communities — turning followe...

Completion rate is the percentage of people who watched a video all the way to the end, out of everyone who started watching it. It tells you whether your content holds attention a...

Conversation rate is the percentage of your audience that leaves a comment on a piece of social content, calculated as comments divided by followers or impressions. It isolates the...

The ecosystem of individuals who build audiences around content and monetise through brand partnerships, platforms, subscriptions and products. For marketers, it's the influencer m...

Creator licensing is the practice of paying a content creator for the right to reuse their content beyond its original organic post, such as in paid ads, on your website, or in ema...

A creator partnership is an ongoing working relationship between a brand and a content creator, built around repeated collaborations rather than a single sponsored post. It usually...

Cross-posting means publishing the same piece of content, often unchanged, across multiple social platforms at once. Native content is built specifically for one platform, matching...

Employee advocacy is when staff voluntarily share their employer's content, wins or opinions on their own social media profiles. It works because a post from a real person's accoun...

Engagement bait is content designed to manipulate a platform's algorithm by prompting likes, comments or shares that have nothing to do with genuine interest in the message. Common...

Engagement rate measures what share of the people who saw or follow you on social media actually interacted with your content. Interactions typically include likes, comments, share...

Engagement rate can be calculated two different ways. Engagement rate (ER) by reach divides engagements by the number of accounts who saw the post. ER by followers divides the same...

First comment strategy is the practice of leaving a caption free of outbound links and instead posting the link as the first comment on the post. Marketers use it because several p...

Follower growth rate is the percentage increase in an account's followers over a set period, calculated as new followers divided by the starting follower count. It measures how fas...

Frequency on social is the average number of times a unique person sees your content or ad within a given period. It's calculated as total impressions divided by reach. Low frequen...

A word or phrase prefixed with the # symbol that categorises social media content and makes it discoverable to users searching or following that topic.

Impressions count every time an ad or post is displayed, including repeats to the same person. Reach counts the unique number of people who saw it at least once. One person scrolli...

Influencer marketing is the practice of partnering with individuals who have established credibility and an engaged audience in a specific niche to promote a brand's products or se...

Link in bio refers to the single clickable link allowed in a social media profile, and to the tools (like Linktree or Beacons) that turn that one link into a mini landing page with...

Live shopping is a sales format where a host demonstrates and sells products during a live video stream, usually on a social platform, while viewers buy without leaving the stream....

Meme marketing is when a brand uses internet meme formats, jokes or trending cultural references to promote itself on social media. It trades polish for relatability, aiming to loo...

Organic reach is the number of unique people who see your content without any paid promotion behind it. It includes followers who see your post in their feed and anyone who discove...

Organic reach decay is the ongoing decline in how many followers see a page or profile's unpaid posts. It happens because platforms increasingly prioritise paid content and whateve...

Social media content posted without paid promotion. Relies on algorithm distribution and follower engagement for reach. Organic reach has declined significantly across all major pl...

Paid reach is the number of unique accounts that see your paid social content at least once. Unlike impressions, which count every view including repeats, reach counts each person...

Pinned content is a post an account manually fixes to the top of its profile or feed, regardless of when it was published. It overrides the usual reverse-chronological or algorithm...

Platform-native content is content made specifically for the format, tone and behaviour of one social platform, rather than repurposed from somewhere else. A native TikTok video lo...

Platform-native content is content created specifically for the format, audience behaviour and algorithm of a single platform, rather than content repurposed from elsewhere. A Link...

Posting cadence is how often a brand publishes content on a given social channel and how consistently it sticks to that rhythm. It covers both frequency (daily, weekly) and reliabi...

Reach throttling is when a social platform deliberately limits how many followers see an organic post from a business or brand page. Platforms like Meta throttle reach to encourage...

Reels are short-form vertical video content on Instagram and Facebook, designed for entertainment-first discovery. They are currently the highest-reach organic format on Instagram...

Save rate is the percentage of people who bookmarked a piece of content out of everyone who saw it. Calculated as total saves divided by reach, multiplied by 100. Instagram and Tik...

A shadowban is when a social platform quietly reduces how many people see your content without telling you or removing the post. Unlike a suspension, your account still works and y...

Share rate is the percentage of people who saw a piece of content and then shared it with their own network. Calculated as total shares divided by reach, multiplied by 100. It meas...

A shoppable post is a social media post with tagged products that let a viewer tap through to buy without leaving the platform or with a single extra step. It turns a normal photo,...

Social commerce is the integration of shopping functionality directly into social media platforms, allowing users to discover and purchase products without leaving the app. Instagr...

Social listening is the practice of monitoring social media platforms, forums, news sites and the broader web for mentions of your brand, competitors, products and relevant industr...

A social media algorithm is the system a platform uses to decide what appears in each user's feed and in what order. It optimises for attention, showing people the content most lik...

Social media marketing is using social platforms to build awareness, attract customers and retain an audience. It covers both organic activity (posting, engaging, building a follow...

Australia's social media minimum age is a legal requirement that platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube prevent Australians under 16 from holding accounts. Enforced...

Social selling is the practice of using social media to find, connect with and build trust with potential buyers before a sale happens. It relies on genuine engagement, sharing use...

Social SEO is the practice of optimising social media profiles, captions, hashtags and video content so they surface in search results, both inside a platform's own search bar and...

Social share of voice is the percentage of total conversation in your category that mentions your brand instead of a competitor. It's calculated by dividing your brand mentions by...

Spark Ads and whitelisting are ways of running paid ads that appear to come from a creator's account rather than the brand's. TikTok calls it Spark Ads. Meta calls it whitelisting...

Stories are full-screen vertical content that disappears after 24 hours, available on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. They function differently to feed posts and demand a different...

Story, Reel and Feed are the three main content formats on Instagram, each shown to a different mix of people for a different length of time. A Story is a temporary post that disap...

TikTok marketing uses the platform's short-form video format and discovery algorithm to reach audiences organically or through paid ads. Unlike other platforms, TikTok still delive...

Unique reach counts the number of distinct people who saw your content, each counted once no matter how many times they saw it. Total reach, more accurately called impressions, cou...

Trend-jacking (also called newsjacking) is the practice of inserting a brand into a trending topic, meme or news story to ride its existing attention. It works by attaching a brand...

A UGC ad is a paid advertisement built from content that looks like it was made by an ordinary customer or creator rather than a brand. It typically uses handheld filming, casual t...

Vanity metrics are social media numbers that rise easily, look impressive in a report and reveal almost nothing about whether the business is actually growing. Follower counts, lik...

Watch time is the total accumulated minutes people spend viewing a piece of video content, summed across every view. It's calculated by multiplying total views by the average time...