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The social marketing glossary.

26 essential social media marketing terms across metrics, formats, strategy, and platform mechanics, decoded in plain English with why each matters to business results.

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Metrics
AOV (Average Order Value)
The average dollar amount a customer spends per purchase. Nudging it up is often cheaper than chasing new buyers.
Conversion
When someone takes the action you actually wanted, whether that's a purchase, a sign-up, or a booked call. Everything else is just traffic.
CPC (Cost Per Click)
What you pay each time someone clicks your ad. Tells you how much a single interested visitor costs.
CPL (Cost Per Lead)
What it costs in ad spend to generate one lead (a form fill, a call, a booked demo). The number that tells you if paid is actually feeding your pipeline.
CPM (Cost Per Mille)
What you pay to get your ad in front of 1,000 people. The base price of attention on a platform.
CTR (Click-Through Rate)
The percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked it. Low CTR usually means the creative or the offer isn't pulling its weight.
Engagement Rate
The percentage of people who saw your post and actually did something about it (liked, commented, shared, saved). The truest gut-check on whether content lands, not just how far it traveled.
Follower vs Reach
Followers are your subscribers; reach is who actually saw a given post, which is usually a fraction of them. Big follower counts don't pay the bills.
Impressions
The total number of times your content was displayed, including the same person seeing it more than once. Always higher than reach.
Reach
The number of unique people who saw your content at least once. Reach is how many humans, not how many views.
ROAS (Return On Ad Spend)
How much revenue you earn for every dollar of ad spend. A 4x ROAS means $4 back for every $1 in. The scoreboard for paid social.
Saves
When someone bookmarks your post to come back to it. One of the strongest signals you made something genuinely worth keeping.
Vanity Metrics
Numbers that look impressive but don't move the business, like raw follower counts and total likes. Fun to screenshot, useless in a P&L.
Formats
Carousel
A swipeable post with multiple images or slides. Great for teaching, storytelling, or getting more than one shot at stopping the scroll.
Hook
The first one to three seconds of a video that decides whether someone keeps watching or keeps scrolling. Win the hook or nothing else matters.
Reels
Short, vertical, sound-on videos on Instagram and Facebook, built for discovery. The format the algorithm currently pushes hardest to non-followers.
Stories
Full-screen vertical posts that vanish after 24 hours. Low-pressure, high-frequency content for the people who already follow you.
UGC (User-Generated Content)
Content made by real customers or creators instead of your brand's polished studio. It reads as authentic because it is, and it usually outperforms the glossy stuff.
Strategy
Community Management
Actually replying to comments, DMs, and mentions like a human. It's where followers quietly turn into customers, and where most brands go silent.
Content Pillars
The three to five core themes everything you post ladders back to. They keep your feed focused instead of a random pile of whatever you felt like that day.
Organic vs Paid
Organic is reach you earn for free by posting; paid is reach you buy with ad spend. You need both, and pretending otherwise is how growth stalls.
Social Listening
Monitoring what people say about your brand, competitors, and category across social, even when they don't tag you. Free market research if you bother to look.
Mechanics
Algorithm
The platform's ranking system that decides who sees what. It rewards content people engage with fast, which is why the first hour after posting matters.
Boosted Post
An organic post you put money behind with one click. Easy, but blunt, and rarely a real substitute for a properly built ad campaign.
Dwell Time
How long someone lingers on your post before moving on. A quiet signal the algorithm loves, which is why 'stop the scroll' beats 'get the like.'
Shadowban
When a platform quietly limits your reach without telling you, usually over flagged content or spammy behavior. Often blamed, rarely confirmed, sometimes real.
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