As we diligently work to stay abreast of social media trends, we found some great sources that define social media terms that are particularly beneficial for businesses. The information below are a combination of two sources that are at the cornerstone of social media: The Salty Waffle and Social Media Today.
What Does It All Mean? Social Media Vocab for Businesses: Part Four (S thru T)
Second Life: Second Life is a complete virtual world where people can interact, form groups, play games, and even shop, yes, with real money. There are 18 million ‘residents’ of the Second Life world.
SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users.
SEM: Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising.
SMO: Stands for Social Media Optimization and is an insanely broad term that applies to basically anything you do in the social media world to attract people to content. The focus is on networking and word of mouth and works for organic growth vs. pay-per-click or other paid advertising methods.
Social Bookmarking: A centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents.Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging". Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, enabling users to organize their bookmarks in flexible ways and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies. The top social bookmarking sites are Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, and Pinterest.
Social Media Advertising: Paying for people to post articles, tweet, etc. on your behalf; paying for static advertisements on social sites, including message boards, Facebook and forums.
Social Media Anxiety: A fear of communication social media sites. Severely cripples one’s ability to communicate through social media channels and is driven by a fear of being judged poorly by peers.
Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics, and computer science. An alternate name for the process in the context of search engines designed to find web pages on the Internet is web indexing. Popular engines focus on the full-text indexing of online, natural language documents. Media types such as video and audio ]and graphics are also searchable. Meta search engines reuse the indices of other services and do not store a local index, whereas cache-based search engines permanently store the index along with the corpus. Unlike full-text indices, partial-text services restrict the depth indexed to reduce index size. Larger services typically perform indexing at a predetermined time interval due to the required time and processing costs, while agent-based search engines index in real time.
Social Media Marketing: Initiating and participating in relevant conversation online in order to divert traffic to your site.
Social Network Exclusion Anxiety: A fear of being left out on a social network. Missing a conversation or not being invited to an exclusive social media driven event may create or compound this anxiety.
Splog: is short for spam blog. These are blogs that use automated systems to create fake blogs full of links and ripped off content. The idea is to garner higher search ranking, but publishers of these blogs are seen as bad guys and these sites never last long before people, or Google figure it out.
Synergy: Dare we simply say teamwork between companies online?
Tag: Indicates or labels what web content is about.
Tag Cloud: A tag cloud is a visual representation of the popularity of different tags being used on a site. A tag is a word, term, or description that helps people find relevant content by sorting it. In a tag cloud the biggest words are the most popular and vice versa.
Troll: There are some pretty rough definitions for so-called trolls out there, but basically a troll is a person that just really hates what you have to say on your site or blog and dedicates an unusual amount of time to arguing against your points, posting inflammatory comments, or writing ill of you or your website. You can’t really win if you pick up a troll unless you manage to turn them, but be careful, they can be powerful, scare off other readers, and poke holes in your credibility. (Justly or not).
Tumblr: It may sound like it, but this isn’t the name of an awesome new sled. Tumblr is a site that allows users to share all kinds of content in blog, or ‘tumbling’ form. You can post links, pictures, writing, video, and even music. The service is gaining rapid popularity as of late because it so simple to use and offered for free.
Tweep: One of your twitter people. Twitter + people = Tweep! This could be a follower or a person you follow, anyone that is part of your Twitter network.
Tweet: A 140 character or less status update. A form of micro-blogging, but in the Twitter world its called a tweet. Just a short blurb about anything and everything from social media to ice cream.
TweetIn: Kind of like a Tweetup, TweetIn is a similar idea to a Twitter conference call. A bunch of Twitterers agree to meet on Twitter at a certain time and the conversation begins!
Tweetroll: A widget for your site that allows you to choose a search term, or your own twitter stream, and then display all the tweets related to that term in a scrolling box anywhere you choose to put it. Great for SEO.
Tweetup: A meet up in the Twitter world. A tweetup is a gathering, spontaneous or planned, of people that are all on Twitter. Hashtags typically spread the news about tweetups. The largest tweetup so far was in Northern Ireland with 13,000 tweeps.
Twitpic: A service that allows you to share pictures on Twitter, check it out!
Twitter Rage: Any anger stemming from a Twitter experience. Ignored tweets, slow connections, or fail whale could be the source.
Twitterati: The so-called Twitter elite. Those Twitter celebrities whose tweets go out to the hundreds of thousands and regularly make the evening news for their 140 character thoughts.
Twitterisms: all words Twitter! So any of these words and many, many more. With more to be invented I’m sure!
Twittersphere: The huge floating cloud in the sky (well, cloud somewhere in a Silicon Valley server farm) that holds everything Twitter. The Twittersphere is made up of tweeps, tweets, and tweeters.
Twoosh: A tweet that uses exactly all 140 characters! Swoosh!