The A-Z of Social Media (Part 2)

October 4, 2018

So we outlined our favourite Social Media terms from A to M in our last blog, and we’re here today to follow up with the second half of the alphabet.

N – News Feed

Your news feed is in effect a timeline of social media posts that are featured on your social channels – effectively your social network’s ‘homepage’. A news feed specifically refers to Facebook as this is the network that features detailed ‘news’. How your news feed appears however, can differ between users depending on their own usage and interests. Algorithms have taken over the social networks – to the detriment of  users, some might say. With a promise from Facebook that the most recent algorithm update will help content to be filtered with a preference for family and friends’ content over publishers’ content, it is expected that users will engage more with their news feeds.

O – Offer

An offer on social media is pretty much the same as an offer anywhere else. In ecommerce terms, your social networks are prime real estate to promote your services to a captive audience. Once you have researched your client base, you can tailor your message to target effectively and choose offers that suit the audience of the specific social channel you’re using.

P – Page view

A Page View (PV) is a record of every visit to your web page that is being tracked by your Google Analytics code. You may also see the term ‘Unique Page View’, these are calculated on a session basis (usually a 24 hour window) and represent a total of page views generated by the same user within the session – so for example if a user loads several pages within a single session, it will only be recorded once. As Page Views are calculated per visit, you’ll find that Page Views will always outnumber Unique Page Views.

Q – QR Code

Also known as a Quick Response Code. Designed originally for the Japanese car industry in 1994, a QR code is the trademark for a particular type of matrix barcode. Scan the code with your smartphone (you can download an app) and you will be connected directly to a website / email / text / phone number and more! How is this relevant to social media? Well, you can create a social media-specific QR code to direct users to all of your social channels, using just one QR code. In addition to that, the networks are getting on board with QR codes to promote your accounts – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, Instagram ‘Name Tags’, Snapchat, Pinterest.

R – Retweet

Also known as a RT, a retweet refers to the social network Twitter and is basically a repost or forwarded tweet by one user to another. A retweet is part of the engagement metric and helps to signify which of your content is resonating with followers. As a key part of Twitter’s social interaction, a RT will help to get your message out and find a new audience.

S – SEO

With 89% of B2B buyers (1) and 81% of online shoppers (2) turning to Google when they need to find something out, it’s safe to say that without a presence on Google your business probably won’t last very long.

Search Engine Optimisation is the strategy needed to help you build your presence and visibility in Google’s organic search results. By ranking higher for relevant search terms in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), you will drive more visitors to your site with the intention of increasing conversions.

So what can SEO do to help your social media marketing efforts? By promoting content and getting found on online, despite not impacting your Google rank directly, “social signals” will still be taken into account when ranking a page.

Your business will have a better chance of being found via a web search and optimising your social channels and keeping your profile and content fresh will also help you get more exposure.

Social channels have become search channels in their own right, resulting in your business reaching even more people. And by using the right hashtags in your social posts, they’ll help to open up a whole new audience.

T – Twitter

Twitter was launched in 2006 as a micro-messaging platform, with posts limited to only 140 characters at the time (including text, links and images). A social network that has turned into one of the “biggest communications technologies of the last hundred years” (3), the platform has had several updates since its launch, to help bring it in-line with its competitors, such as doubling the character length to 280, the introduction of the Moments feature and many more. Here are a few current facts and figures (4):

• The first tweet was by founder @Jack: “just setting up my twttr”
• 335 million monthly active users
• 500 million tweets sent per day
• 80% of users on mobile
• 100 million daily active users

U – User

User is the name given to a person ‘using’ a computer and its’ technologies. In Google Analytics, the term is a metric defined as “the total number of users for the requested time period”. Likewise, we refer to users of Social Media in much the same way. The graph below shows the number of social media users worldwide from 2010 to 2016 with projections up until 2021. (5)

 

V – Video

In recent years, great importance has been placed on using video within social media posts and content marketing in general. Video can be used in posts to help boost conversions and sales. It has been reported that adding a product video on your landing page can increase conversions by 80% (6) with 83% of businesses believing that video gives them a good ROI (7), despite the initial production costs.

Hosting videos on your social media channels helps build trust between your brand and your followers, it’s no accident that YouTube influencers have become the most powerful type of influencer to date!

By their very nature, videos will encourage users to stay on your channel and site for longer, letting Google know that your content is of value. Ever since Google purchased YouTube back in 2006, there has been a rise in just how much video can affect your content becoming discoverable.

When it comes to placing your video content on social media it’s important to remember that most users watch video with no sound. In fact, according to multiple publishers, 85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound (8).

 

W – Website

By definition, a website is a group of connected pages on the World Wide Web that are located under a single domain name. The first website was launched in 1991, the image below is how the page looked in 1992 (the first ever screenshot) and this is its url – http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html (9) The Indexed Web contains at least 4.51 billion pages (as of 1st October 2018) and there are over 1.8 billion websites to date (10), although a high number of these do not receive any visitors.

X (Gen-X)

We hear a lot about the Millennial demographic but not so much on Generation X. Gen-X refers to the birthing generation of 1961-1981 and is the generation that has lived through the early stages of the internet and social media, unlike Millennials (1981-1997) who have pretty much grown up with the internet.

A recent study identified that Gen X-ers are playing a critical role in leadership at work as organisations get to grips with digital transformation (11). 54% of Gen X and 56% of millennials said that they were digitally savvy, so not a great difference between the two groups despite the age gap. Similarly, research by Nielson found Gen X to be the most connected generation, using social media 40 minutes more than millennials. So with Gen X-ers more addicted to social media than their millennial counterparts (12), don’t forget to take your audience into consideration when writing up your social media content and researching which networks best suit your brand.

Y – YouTube

YouTube is the video sharing platform launched in 2005 and bought out by Google in 2006. It was the first large-share video platform, available in almost every country and over fifty languages. Whether you’re a teen sat at home recording video on your smartphone or a huge organisation paying millions to record a promotional video, there is a place on YouTube for everyone. Here are some facts and figures to date (13):

• 1,300,000,000 people use YouTube
• 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute
• 5 billion (almost) videos are watched every day
• 30 million + visitors per day
• 3.25 billion hours of video are watched every month

 

Z – ZZZ

Don’t be boring! Social media networks have the scope to be so much fun and are great platforms for creativity. The most obscure videos can go viral, the strangest tweets become popular and the most basic photographs can become masterpieces. So go forth, have fun, play around with technology and become the next social media superstar!

 

If you need any further support with your social media strategy, get in touch with a member of our team today. Or apply for a FREE AUDIT of all of your digital marketing channels, including social media.

 

1. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/the-changing-face-b2b-marketing/
2. https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics?_ga=2.66632555.437466058.1538484329-2062338875.1538484329
3. https://www.lifewire.com/history-of-twitter-3288854
4. https://www.omnicoreagency.com/twitter-statistics/
5. https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/
6. https://www.insivia.com/50-must-know-stats-about-video-marketing-2016/
7. https://www.wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics-2017/
8. https://digiday.com/media/silent-world-facebook-video/
9. https://www.businessinsider.com/flashback-this-is-what-the-first-website-ever-looked-like-2011-6?IR=T
10. Netcraft January 2018 Web Server Survey
11. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/generation-x–not-millennials–is-changing-the-nature-of-work.html
12. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/technology/millennial-social-media-usage.html
13. https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/