No matter what your business is, there are always terms and acronyms that people throw out in blogs and they expect you to know what they are talking about. Here are common social media terms you need to know…

API – Application Programming Interface, commonly used by developers – it is code that is intended to be used by other software components to communicate with one other.

Avatar – graphical images that represent people. They can be a logo, image, or photo.

B2B – Business to Business, commonly used to describe the type of customers a company sells their products to.

B2C – Business to Consumer, commonly used to describe the type of customers a company sells their products to.

Blog – short for the word Weblog, it’s a web page that is similar to a journal or diary, although many companies now use them for business news, tips and tricks.

Blogroll – is a list of blogs usually located in the sidebar of another blog indicating who that blogger reads on a regular basis.

Crowdsourcing – a term used to harness knowledge and skills of a group of people to solve a problem or contribute content.

CTA – Call-to-action, commonly used in email or marketing campaigns and signifies what you want a person to do once they see your campaign or ad.

Feeds – are ways in which you can read or listen to items from blogs, podcasts, or other RSS feeds without going to the actual websites. You can set up the feed to be delivered to you via email or you can go to the feed site.

Freemium – a type of business model that offers you some of the product for free and then allows you to upgrade and add additional options for a premium price.

Hashtag – is the pound sign (#) that is put in front of keywords or phrases and used on Twitter so that people can track and follow those conversations easily

iOS – is a mobile operating system developed by Apple. 

Metatags
– are keywords that are embedded in your HTML of your website that provide information about the site’s content and allow search engines to categorize your site.

Microblogging – the act of posting short messages to a website.  For example, Twitter is a microblogging site.

Newsfeed –  is a feed full of news that you want to receive or have subscribed to. For example, for Twitter it is all of the tweets from the people you are following comprise your news feed. For Facebook, all of your “friends” posts are considered your news feed.

OS – stands for Operating System and is a program loaded onto a computer or mobile device that performs common basic tasks such as sending output to the display screen.

Permalink – A web address (URL) of a particular post within a blog or website

Plugin – is a software component that adds functionality to a website or blog. For example, social sharing buttons are usually packaged as a plugin so that it allows people to share from your website or blog.

Podcast – video or audio content that can be subscribed to and then downloaded from a website so that you can view or listen offline.

Post – text that you type in a box on a web page to educate or inform others of news or information you wish to share on the internet to an audience

ROI – an acronym that stands for return on investment and refers to what you will get in return for the amount of time or money you are investing in something.

RSS – stands for really simple syndication and it allows you to subscribe to blogs or other media and have it delivered to you through a feed.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization, used when talking about keywords that increase your search rank on web search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

Status update – commonly used to refer to a post on Facebook, it is text you type into a web page to educate or inform an audience on the interenet.

SMO – Social media (or marketing) optimization, is the measure of social activity that attracts users to website content.

Social bookmarking – is the act of adding a link to a website that can be organized and tagged by the user. Examples of social bookmarking sites are Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Delicious.

Widget –  is a chunk of code that allows you to add functionality to your website without you having to write any code yourself. It usually displays static content, although sometimes they are derived from plugins and can be someone dynamic with rotating text for example.