Social Media Terminology

Social Bookmarking Glossary of terms

In the world of Social Media Marketing there is a unique, ever-growing language as new concepts (and gimmicks) are developed and circulate into commonplace phrases. Each social marketing site has it's own unique wording, and for the most part they are often used interchangeable with more commonly used words. For example, remember when "widgets" was a fictionalized word used in economics and business classes? Well, now they are "real" entities used to describe functionality that you can find on wordpress blogs and social bookmarking websites.

To understand these social media jargon, is to understand the unique selling point of various websites and how they operate, as well as the general features of Social Media Marketing.

Addthis – An Addthis bar is a form of "widget" (see below) that can be placed on your own site which when clicked opens a separate window into a list of links to a selection of available and popular social bookmarking sites. Having one of these makes it much easier to manage the social bookmarking sites that link to your site, and also facilities human users of your site to easily bookmark the site themselves.

Anchor Text - Anchor text is when a hyperlink (a link to a website) is attached to a word of text that is relevant to the site itself. Such links are valuable as they have a strong influence in what Google sees as relevant to a page, and therefore what it ranks highly for searches it performs. In social media marketing it is important to remain conscious of the Anchor Text being made as you submit your sites, give them a description, tags and so forth.

Are you Human? – In many regards the most difficult and time consuming part of Social Media Marketing – These mechanisms demand that you type in randomly generated words into a blank space in order to verify that the user is indeed a human – although even at the best of times these can be faulty. Submitting in mass can be slowed down hugely by this simple obstacle.

Authority – 'Authority' is a term used in social bookmarking site Technorati to describe the value of a submitted link. Authority is displayed numerically based on the amount of external blogs that also link to the same URL. The Authority of a link determines how high it will appear on Technortti searches and appears alongside searches so that users can manually sort through links and easily see their credibility. Authority is also associated with Google's idea of "page rank." Essentially, a way of deciding how valuable a website is.

Are We Similar? Often, "collaborative filtering" and more recently on Facebook, the "Social Graph." Techniques that many websites and services to create the organization of content. Essential they comparing the information of millions of pieces of content (such as a YouTube video, or Netflix DVDs, Amazon videos, blog post, Facebook friends ect.) to calculate and predict things that like-minded users may be interested in.

This creates a sense of social relevance on the websites. An example of this is on Youtube, under the 'related videos' section, which attempts to determine what other videos are like the one you just watched or would be relevant to you. Facebook has a similar collaborative filter, when it attempts to decide who you may know on the website by use of your network of friends. If 10 of your Facebook friends all know the same person, Facebook may think that you know them well and suggest that you add them to your network. iTunes uses a similar concept with music, trying to discern what other songs that you might like to buy, based on your own purchases as well as that of other people "similar" to you.

As the web is becoming increasingly based around social interactions and sharing based on profile history, Collaborative Filtering will no-doubt become more complex and harder to predict. For now, it is very much in it's infant stages and very limited. Content that has few views will have obscure, irrelevant links generated for them as visiting users are not are too small in number to give a strong consensus as to what the content's theme is.

Digg - Digg is a social bookmarking website where you submit and share links of websites. To 'Digg' something, within the context of Digg.com, is to rate something positively. One Digg user profile is able to Digg a link once and only once, and is then able to comment on the link. Traffic from digg tends to be low-value for most companies. You might have a page that is "Dugg" and goes "viral" only to find that you get thousands of visitors that crash your website server and who don't buy anything!

SEO – 'Search Engine Optimization', as in the work needed to make a particular website more competitive in reaching higher spots in search engines, such as Google and Yahoo. Companies and organization often try to use social websites and bookmarking sites for SEO, but generally, there are much more effective ways to do this.

Social Graphs – Social Graphs are any graphical representation of a group of people or network. They can be used to show the connection of websites to each other and to show the members of websites and how they interact. Social Graphs can be used to monitor connections in the Internet and plan marketing campaigns to have a knock-on effect through viral marketing in order to reach larger numbers of people through relevant sites and web rings.

Spamdexing – Spamdexing is when companies attempt to get their keywords listed by google through spamming social media sites, forums and personal web pages. Nobody can say for sure how beneficial such attempts are, but each social networking site has it's own particular view on spamming and spammers – As bookmarking directories are not maintained with the same moderating power and care of google itself, the results of user searches can be overt spamming campaigns. When spamdexing is used in a more general sense, outside of the world of business promotion, it is known as 'Google bombing'.

Stumbled – To Stumble (verb) is to randomly generate a site based upon how the website StumbledUpon.com perceives your preferences, based on your history of submissions to your Stumbledupon profile.

Tags - Tags are a way of associating your links and content in a searchable fashion for directories and people. You can decide what your content is about and add a tag to it. This page that you are reading right now, could be tagged, "social media" "social media terminology" and other words relevant to the information on the page. Many websites and blogging platforms will automatically generate tags and you can simply pick the one's that you think fit.

Most bookmarking sites are open, as in you can type whatever keywords you like, and other sites (Such as Digg) make use of closed links, where you chose from a limited list and their subheading.
Tags always need to be separated properly before they have any benefit, and different sites use different methods to separate tags – most commonly tags are separated by commas, but other sites may use spaces or semi-colons.

Tag cloud – A tag cloud is a graphical representation provided by certain bookmarking sites to illustrate to users all of the different tags that they have ascribed to their content. The tag cloud is an image compiled from several words in varying sizes and colors in order to show their relationship to each other – the larger words will be those that often feature as tags for your links, where as the smaller words will be represent the words that are scarcely used as tags – which among other things is a helpful way of finding mistakes in the tags that would otherwise render them useless – i.e type-o's and unseperated tags.

Twitter - Twitter is a popular site with a semi-unique function and it's own unique verb. To Twitter is to publish a short paragraph statement on Twitter.com. These can be ranging from anything from opinions to how you've spent you're day – but some social media sites (Such as Mister Wong) enable you to post submitted links onto Twitter instantly. These will only be accessed, however, by other members of Twitter that 'follow' your profile.

Toolbar – Toolbars are downloadable utilities provided by social media sites that you can add to your browser to make bookmarking and monitoring changes much quicker and easier. Sites that are already bookmarked will often show different displays in the toolbar, which is a particularly good way of maintaining which URL's have already been bookmarked to that bookmarking site.

Viral Marketing – Viral Marketing is when a community, virtual or physical, spreads the message of product or service amongst itself. Due to the internet's ability to spread information through word-of-mouth it is more likely than ever that ideas will find their niche market, find constructive criticism and set the viral marketing in an upward spiral of development – but the idea has to have a good start.

Virtual Community – A virtual community is a website's user base that contributes to the content of the website with their own individual input. The virtual community can make or break a social media site with their influence, and many social media sites have attempted to encourage communities to grow – However, nobody can predict quite how communities will grow.

Web 2.0 – Web 2.0 is a confusing phrase, because some might see it as a over-enthusiastic claim – implying something separate from the Internet itself, when in reality it's completely reliant on existing technologies. Web 2.0 simply refers to social media, which includes video-sharing sites, art-sharing sites, blogs, forums and social networks.

Widgets – The term widgets refers to minature software programs. For social bookmarking websites, they are custom made Internet icons that can be placed independently on any website. They carry a link, often to a specific action related to the page in which they are placed. For example, a common widget is the Digg It! icon from Digg.com. When placed on a page it allows viewers to quickly and easily show their support for the page by bookmarking it themselves or rating it positively.

On blogs, widgets can add tags, images, links, quotations, and whatever else a programmer can dream up!