The lingo
Before diving too deep into the course, let's take a look at the terms you’ll hear a lot!
Content.
Content is the key to social media marketing and is often one of the biggest challenges. Knowing what to post, when and being creative to constantly come up with new content can be challenging. Content is essentially all of your businesses stories, updates, news, products and services. It includes blogs, websites, videos, visuals, sales materials, email, posters, copy, pretty much everything you produce to tell customers about your business.
You've probably all heard the term SEO. It stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the process of firsty making your website found on the internet and secondly making it outrank your competitors. With search, it is vital to be found near the top of key terms (known as keywords). Often you'll work with a web design agency like us to optimize your site and come up with new fresh content. There are also many things you can do including keyword research and blogging to help answer your customers questions.
I hear you ask, what are keywords? The term is used to describe the words your customers use when they are searching on Google to find your product or services. To help your customers find your website it is important to use these keywords throughout the copy of your website. The term keywords can be broken down further into short and long tail keywords. Short keywords are exactly that, for example if I’m looking for a plumber, a short keyword will be ‘plumber’. The term pumber is likely to be highly competitive as every plumber in the area will be competing for this keyword, making it less likely for your website to be found. Whereas if you use a longtail keyword such as ‘plumber to fix a toilet’ it will be less competitive and you’ll have a better chance of ranking and being found. The great benefit of targeting long tail keywords is it will eventually help you target those more competitive short tail keywords as your site gains more authority for this topic. One important point to note, is the Google algorithm is always changing, and although keywords are important, what's more important is the overall topic. The key is not to be spammy with keywords and use copy to talk about your business in a natural way.
When we talk about SEO we are talking about organic traffic, in other words people who find you by searching. A related term is SEM or search engine marketing, which refers to the paid part of digital marketing, including Google Ads. Paid for ads on Google and social is an incredibly powerful way to drive new business, enquiries and traffic to your site with immediate results.
Similar to keywords, hashtags help your content be discovered. Hashtags start with the hash symbol followed by the keyword and are used to follow topics, content or conversations on social media platforms. The other point to note, different words in hashtags are not separated by spaces.
What are Tags? Tagging is a way to stoke interaction by sending a notification to a person or business in the content you are posting. A simple example is if you post a picture with a friend, you might ‘tag’ your friend. They will get notified of your post and are likely to interact with it. Another example is if you have a great meal, you might take a picture of the food and ‘tag’ the business.
How about mobile? Mobile refers to the content a person consumes on-the-go, usually on a smartphone. Although tablets are part of this, most mobile content is consumed on a smartphone. Because people spend so much time looking at a small screen, we need to take that into account when we communicate. This is especially true when you're creating infographics and data visualizations.
Let's start with infographic. An infographic is an example of visual storytelling that integrates texts and graphics to paint a picture of an organization or illustrate a trend.
Data visualisations are when you take complex tables of data and turn them into things like pie charts or colorful graphs that are easier for people to grasp. Again, keep them simple so people can understand them on a mobile device. In many cases, infographics and data visualizations are created by a social media manager.
A social media manager is the face and voice of the company online. They will have a social media strategy and are responsible for content, posting, engaging and listening. They have a diverse role and require a broad skill set as it encompasses marketing, strategy, analytics, content creation and PR. They will work closely with a community manager, social media strategist and marketing director to manage campaigns.
A community manager will post and interact as a brand ambassador, usually under their own social account. They do sometimes include the brand name to provide a cohesive link, while giving an individual voice. This can have the benefit of giving a brand a face and making it more approachable than just a company. They work on developing the community by engaging with current customers and finding new ones. They are often seen as advocates for a brand and are constantly working with the social media manager and strategist at ways to create and grow a community around the brand.
A lot of brands are now using livestream video and publishing them on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin. They are a great way to showcase a new product or an event as customers can watch it as it happens and feel part of the action. But remember, the best Livestreams are well organised and planned. You shouldn't just wing it!
Like everything, social media is constantly evolving. But we hope this small sample of some of the terms we use in social media marketing, help you understand them as we dive deeper into the training.
The lingo - Exercise:
Question and answer but multiple choice.
- What is X term mean? Pick one of 3 options.