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Important Terms for Online Marketing

Marketing is essential for growth in business, and online platforms, especially social media, can be powerful tools to market your business. Many of your potential clients will find you on a social media platform before they see you online or in the real world. But this world of social media marketing has become vast, and full of jargon that a business owner may feel goes over their head. So, we’ve compiled a list of the terms that we feel are most important for small business owners to understand when they’re ready to start marketing their business online.

Algorithm - When talking about social media, you may hear a lot about algorithms, these are computer codes that systems use to decide which content to show to which users on social media sites.


Banner - Facebook and LinkedIn both have places to put banner (sometimes called cover) images on your profile. It’s usually behind or above your profile picture and can be a great way to show more of your company’s branding and set a tone for your pages.


Boosted Post - Slightly different than an ad, a boosted post is taking a post you’ve put up on Facebook or Instagram and paying some money to have it made into an ad or pushed into the feeds of people who aren’t already following you, or who are likely to interact with your page.


DM - DM is shorthand for “direct message”. This usually refers to the messaging system within the app or platform you’re using. Some experts say that DMs are more effective for getting followers to contact you than using a website or email.


Follower - Your followers are the users who have decided they want to keep up with your posts on social media, depending on the platform, they clicked on like or follow or something else, but these are the people who are most likely to see the posts you put up.


Hashtag - Hashtags are a big part of social media platforms and are beginning to be used on nearly all of them. You’ll usually see them at the end of a post, sometimes in blue. They use the number or pound sign: # and contain no spaces or extra characters between the words. They are, essentially, search terms to help users find the content they are interested in. Hashtags can build your brand by making your posts easier to find.

Meme - In contemporary language, “meme” is usually referring to graphics or pictures that have words on them, they can go “viral” and be used as a sort of shorthand to make a point or a joke about something in a quick, visual way. Meta Platform - The company that owns Facebook and Instagram changed its name to Meta in 2022. The Meta Platform is a tool that can be used by business owners to create posts, respond to messages, make ads, and more on both Facebook and Instagram. Profile Picture - This is the picture that most people on a platform will see first. On a personal profile, it’s often a picture of you, on a business profile, you may choose to use some of your branding, like a logo, a picture of the front of your building, or some of the products you offer. Reel - Instagram recently changed its platform to make all posted videos into Reels. These are short, less than 60 -second videos that can be viewed by looking at a user's profile or by scrolling from another Reel.

SEO - SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It has to do with how your website is found online. Good SEO includes making sure your webpage includes certain words that people are likely to search for and using them enough to make sure your website comes up in the search results.


Story - A story is a temporary kind of post that can go up on Facebook and Instagram. It’s limited to a few seconds of video or it can be a static picture or graphic. Your followers may get a kind of notification when you have a story because your profile picture may have a ring around it or it might show at the top of their newsfeed. Stories can be a good way to show something you’re doing or working on and keep followers engaged in your content to see a new story whenever they’re posted.


Trending - When we say something is “trending” it means that it’s popular right now. Sometimes certain sounds or music clips can be trending on a site like TikTok or Instagram and using them can help your videos get more views fairly quickly.


We’re constantly learning and adapting to social media changes and updates, so make sure you check back here to see the latest and let us know if there’s a buzzword or concept you’ve heard of recently that you want to know more about!


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