Social Media Marketing Glossary

Terms

• A/B Testing on Social Media: A/B testing compares two versions of a post, differing in one thing such as the hook, image, or posting time, to see which performs better.
• Aspect Ratio: Aspect ratio is the proportion of an image or video's width to its height, written as width:height.
• Best Time to Post: The best time to post is when a specific account's audience is most likely to see and engage with a post.
• Brand Voice: Brand voice is the consistent personality a brand uses in its writing: its tone, vocabulary, and attitude, such as warm and plain-spoken or witty and irreverent.
• Carousel Post: A carousel post holds several images or videos that viewers swipe through in a single post.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Click-through rate is the share of people who clicked a link after seeing a post: link clicks divided by impressions (or reach), times 100.
• Content Calendar: A content calendar is a schedule of what will be published, where, and when.
• Content Pillars: Content pillars are the three to five recurring themes a brand posts about, such as education, behind the scenes, product, and community.
• Content Recycling: Content recycling is republishing or repurposing content you already made, either reposting the same post later or turning it into a new format (a blog post into a carousel, a video into clips).
• Cross-Posting: Cross-posting is publishing the same content to several social networks.
• Engagement Rate: Engagement rate measures how much people interact with a post relative to how many could have.
• Evergreen Content: Evergreen content is content that stays useful long after it is published, such as how-tos, product explainers, FAQs, and tips, as opposed to news, time-limited offers, or posts tied to a date.
• Hashtag: A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by # that groups posts on a topic and makes them discoverable in search.
• Model Context Protocol (MCP): The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor connect to outside tools and data through an MCP server.
• Reach vs Impressions: Reach is the number of unique accounts that saw a post; impressions count every time it was shown, including repeat views by the same account.
• Social Listening: Social listening is monitoring conversations across social networks for mentions of a brand, competitors, products, or keywords, then analyzing sentiment and trends.
• Social Media Analytics: Social media analytics is collecting and interpreting the metrics networks report about your accounts and posts, such as reach, impressions, engagement, clicks, and follower growth, to understand what works and decide what to post next..
• Social Media API: A social media API lets software create, schedule, publish, and measure posts without a person clicking through each network.
• Social Media Scheduling: Social media scheduling is preparing posts in advance and having a tool publish them automatically at set times through each network's official API.
• UTM Parameters: UTM parameters are tags added to the end of a link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term) that tell analytics tools such as Google Analytics where a visit came from.