Speaker 1: Hey, hey there, welcome back to Social Media Management for Beginners. If you've ever stepped into a new industry, you can probably agree that sometimes it feels like your colleagues and your clients are speaking a completely different language to you. I definitely felt that way when I first started in social media. So I wanted to put together a little glossary of terms that I use almost every day that might not make sense to the average person who hasn't sort of lived in this world. So be sure to grab the corresponding download that goes with this episode. It'll be linked in the description box for you to check out. And without further ado, let's get started. A is for algorithm. Oh, algorithm, we mentioned this a bit on episode one. If you missed that, you can check that out up here. Essentially, an algorithm is a particular set of formulas. It's a system, it's a very techie system that honestly, unless you are a computer scientist, you probably don't actually understand how it works. But what it does is it determines how your content is going to be prioritized and seen in feeds. Now, contrary to what a lot of people will tell you, there's no way to really crack the algorithm because it's really ever-changing. Most social media platforms will let you know that the algorithm is there to provide their users the best experience possible. For example, Facebook has come out and said, in essence, that they want Facebook to be a place where people can get information about their friends and family. So that content is going to rise to the top. Instagram has said recently that they're experimenting with how things are prioritized, particularly in regards to short videos and reels and things like that. My golden rule for maintaining the algorithm, if you will, is to test out new features when they come out. Just try them out, see if they work, see if they seem to be getting a boost, and also just be consistent. That really is the key and has been working, for me at least, for my entire social media career is simply making sure that my clients' accounts are up to date and that I'm posting quality content. B is for B2B and B2C. Let's talk about these things. So these are actually general business terms. They're not just social media related, but they refer to audience. So remember how I said in episode one that it's so important to understand who your client's target audience is? Well, it's also important to know if that target audience is B2B or B2C. B2B is business to business and B2C is business to consumer. An example of a B2B company would be an auto parts manufacturer. Typically speaking, random people aren't just buying auto parts, they're selling them wholesale to car companies who use them in their factories. They would likely be selling these parts in bulk, making large orders, and sometimes even working exclusively with particular brands or particular types of vehicles. An example of a B2C company would be a company like McDonald's or Nike. They sell directly to the consumer. I can walk into McDonald's or into Nike and buy anything that I want, and their marketing is largely directed to people like me, just everyday people, not to other companies or CEOs or marketing managers or sales managers or anything like that. In general, the platforms that are a little more B2C would be Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, platforms where we're just everyday people like to scroll and just kind of be entertained. Sites like LinkedIn or even Twitter, those can all lean a little bit more B2B. Now, Twitter is also a very consumer-driven platform as is LinkedIn. There are just workers on LinkedIn as well, but they can sometimes have a more B2B spin, particularly when you're looking at event hashtags on Twitter, conferences, and things like that. C is for click-through rate. Click-through rate refers to the percentage of people who see your content compared with the number of people who actually click on your content. This is a really important metric, and it may be a KPI. We'll talk about that a little bit later. We also talked about it in episode one, but a key performance indicator of how well your content is resonating and how likely it is that people are actually going to purchase based off of a social media post. It's important that you're not just getting a bunch of likes and comments and that people are actually taking action on your content. And click-through rate is one of the metrics that can be associated with that. Content curation. I always think of curation as like a museum. There's a position that works at museums called a museum curator, and what they do is they kind of assemble all of the artifacts or the art, and they choose what's going to be on display. And you can think of your position very similarly. It's your job to choose which types of content are going to be going out where, and if you're sourcing third-party or external content, meaning maybe you're using news articles in your social media strategy or you're posting other content from other creators, you're going to be curating that content as opposed to creating it, meaning snapping the photos or taking a video yourself. It's important to make sure that when you're curating content from external sources, you're actually making sure that they are brand safe and credible. You don't want to just pull a random image from Google for a couple of reasons. One, it might be on a sketchy website that gives people a virus or gives off a bunch of misinformation and fake news, which can reflect poorly upon your client's brand themselves. The second reason is copyright. You want to make sure that you always have permission if you're pulling content and re-uploading it to your client's platforms. You need written permission for this, so don't just screenshot things on Instagram and repost them. Get permission from the original creator to see if you can use it. Now, if you're just sharing a link on LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, that's usually fair game, but I always think it's great to tag the original source as well because who knows they might actually like and engage with your post, giving you more visibility. Conversion rate. Conversion rate refers to the percentage of people who saw your post that actually completed a conversion event and a conversion generally relates to a sale, meaning they went to a point of purchase like a sales page, clicked add to cart and went through the sales process, but it can also refer to any exchange of information like joining an email list or signing up for a webinar or maybe it's filling out a form if you work with a service-based B2B business and they have a discovery call intake form on their website. Content marketing is one that's very easily confused with social media marketing and I think it's important to make the distinction. Now, the truth is I really at my core nowadays that I've been in this industry for several, several years, I consider myself a little bit more of a content marketer. I create content for my clients. I really enjoy being on platforms like YouTube as opposed to keeping up with every new social media trend, but they're both important and let me explain, like I said, the distinction. Content marketing refers to exactly that, content. It's creating videos, blog posts, articles, white papers, eBooks, downloadables, webinars, any type of content that can help establish that know-like trust factor and generally speaking, content marketing often comes after social media marketing. So you first have to have a social presence to be able to lead people over to that content. You say, hey, sign up for the newsletter or download the white paper or the eBook or join us for this webinar. So it really is important that content marketing and social media marketing teams work really closely together if they're not the same person or team originally. Like I said, over the years, my business has changed shape a little bit in the sense that we really do help our clients with their content marketing strategy as well as their social media strategy. But if you're not confident in knowing what types of blog posts to suggest or helping people out with webinars, you should probably recommend that maybe they have somebody on their team who is able to do that or like I said, that you know the people in charge of the content marketing department because they really do work quite well together. We have a lot of Cs here, but the, I guess, fourth or fifth C is CTA or call to action. In short, a CTA directs your audience to take a particular action. Some common CTAs would be click here, learn more, send me a message, contact us, et cetera. CTAs can be found in a lot of places on the web. They can be found in content marketing materials, you know, at the bottom of webinars, buy now, contact us. They can also be found on social media. If you have an Instagram caption, it's always a good idea to end it with some type of a call to action. Comment down below, send me a message if you agree, drop me an emoji, et cetera. In ad content, maybe you're running an ad on LinkedIn or on Facebook, you'll always wanna include a CTA on there as well. It might be learn more, apply now, or so on. It's important to have these be really clear and to not overwhelm people with multiple calls to action. You should always keep in mind, any piece of content you have should have one key call to action. You shouldn't be asking people to click like and leave a comment and send you a message and save the post. It gets really overwhelming. You should really choose the most important one in most cases. It's also important if you use a call to action like comment below or what do you think that you're giving people an easy way to engage with you. An example of a bad call to action would be, tell me what your biggest dream is in life because this is really broad and it will take a lot of thought and a lot of time for people to actually come up with a good answer for that. Meanwhile, if you ask a simple yes, no answer or an emoji answer like, do you dream of ice cream this weekend? People can say, yes, I love mint chocolate chip. Remember that most people on social media are typing on their mobile phones so you want it to be nice and easy for them. D is for dark social. Dark social refers to social media posts or content that are hard to track or not visible to the naked eye. For example, a Facebook ad campaign doesn't show up on the actual Facebook page. A Facebook boost campaign would show up on the page but if you're actually running your ads through ads manager, the only way you can see those ads is by looking at it from the backend, from the user dashboard or from running across it in your social feed. It doesn't exist anywhere on the page. That's an example of a dark post. Another example of a dark post would be a DM. If I send an Instagram post to a friend through DM, the creator of that post won't be able to actually see what we said about it or really where it went. So this is something that's really hard to track but do know that if you're seeing mystery clicks or mystery traffic appear on your analytics reports, this may be one of the places that it's coming from. Engagement rate refers to the total number of engagements that you get, meaning comments like shares divided by the reach of your post. Of course, the higher the engagement rate, the better. This just shows the percentage of your audience that is really interested in your content. And it is really important to be cultivating an audience that truly wants to hear what you're saying. You don't want to just rack up all these followers and have them actually not do anything. This is also a metric that's very important when it comes to influencer marketing. So if your client ever chooses to work with influencers, yes, follower count number does have some play still, but at the end of the day, if those followers are not engaged and they have a very low engagement rate, they likely won't be able to command the same rates as they would if their engagement rate was high. Second E is for evergreen content. An evergreen tree, as far as I know, I actually don't know much about trees, but I believe they stand tall and look the same pretty much all year round. And that's exactly what evergreen content is supposed to do as well. Evergreen content should sort of be always relatable, always applicable content. And my best advice for you when you first get a client is start drafting out a series of evergreen posts right away so that you can always plug something into your content calendar whenever there's a gap. An example of this for maybe my business would be an about us post saying, hey, the company was founded in blah, blah, blah year, and here's what we specialize in. That information really isn't gonna change unless we go through a major rebrand. So it will always be relevant to our customers and our potential customers. Evergreen content is also a great way to sort of solidify your place in the market through SEO. For example, you might see on my YouTube channel a lot of social media manager and social media strategy content. And that's really a pillar topic for me. That's something that I really like to talk about in a market that I'm really in tune with. So over the years of creating a lot of evergreen content that sort of stands the test of time and that's sort of always relevant, even if you look back at some of my old social media manager videos, for the most part, they still make sense and they still are helpful. That helps me in terms of SEO so that I can rank higher and higher and get more views on that particular type of content. I is for impressions. Impressions refers to the total number of times a piece of content was seen. This is often confused with reach, which I'll talk about in just a second. Inbound marketing. Inbound marketing techniques are the opposite of outbound, which outbound would be door-to-door sales, cold calls, cold emails. For inbound, you will be creating some type of content, whether it's social content, blog content, YouTube content, podcast content, et cetera, and people, audience members, will be finding you and engaging with you. In my opinion, inbound marketing is some of the best marketing to invest in. It does take some time to start generating those leads in an inbound strategy. I will be honest. You have to sort of build up your credibility in that space. You have to give people time to find you. You have to get the algorithms all warmed up to your content. But when people do find you, it goes from seeking clients and trying to sell to clients to client attraction. And it's all about the right clients finding you and pretty much being ready to work with you because they're already developing that no-leg trust factor from consuming your content. Oh, and P.S., one of my favorite places to learn more about inbound marketing is HubSpot's inbound marketing course. It's free. I'll go ahead and link it down below. K is for KPI. Like I mentioned last time, KPI refers to Key Performance Indicator. You should choose probably three to five key performance indicators that you measure and track every single month. I put a calendar reminder for myself on the last Friday of every single month to pull KPIs for my clients. And at a glance, they should give me a quick look at the health of the business. I also do this for my own business. I track how many leads we have, how many YouTube subscribers we have, how many views we're getting, et cetera, because those things are directly related to the success of our social media strategy. Reach refers to the total number of users that saw your post. Again, this often gets confused with impressions. And here's how I like to explain it. If I got a Facebook ad for a pair of glasses and I kept seeing that Facebook ad, I saw it 10 times in a week, that would refer to 10 impressions, but only one reach metric, because I'm only one user, I'm one account. Social listening. Now, you can use a fancy tool like Synthesio to perform social listening, but you don't even need to get that fancy. Some of those tools are very expensive and they're very kind of corporate. You can also just search your company name in platforms like Twitter search or Instagram search and see what conversation is happening organically about your brand. You can search hashtags on LinkedIn or Instagram to see if people are using them. And you can also perform social listening on other topics. It doesn't have to just be about your business either. Maybe you are a hair dye company and you want to track bright colored hair and trends with that type of hairstyle. So you might follow particular hashtags like bright hair or pink hair and see how many people are posting that hashtag and what the general interest is for that type of content over time. Social proof is in short, your receipts. Can you really do what you say you can do? It can take the form of a lot of different things. That can be a client review or a testimonial. It can be a Google My Business rating or score. It could be actual screenshots or a case study or a portfolio that you put together. But if you are looking to get clients, it is important to track some of the success that you have, take screenshots of campaigns that perform really well, ask your clients for testimonials and to review you on Facebook or Yelp or any of the platforms that you might have a presence on. Because prospective clients will totally Google you if they're looking to hire you and it's always good to put your best foot forward. And it's also true for your clients. If your clients are looking to sell more of their products, they probably need some good reviews on their Amazon page or on their product page. You can also use social proof as social content if you're doing so with permission, of course. If you get a really great product review, screenshot it and post it as an Instagram story to drum up excitement because I always say, happy customers are truly your best salespeople. T is for traffic. Traffic is one of the most common marketing objectives for social media managers. It's to get more traffic, get people to drive on over to your website, your point of sale, your email list, some other place. Social media can only do so much. It really is important to actually take that social following and move them somewhere else where they can take an action that's going to affect revenue and result in ROI or return on investment. So again, that could mean that they're buying something, that they're signing up for something, that they're exchanging their email address for something, but it's important to get that traffic over to wherever that end goal is going to take place. U is for user-generated content or UGC. User-generated content is simply content that other people create about your brand or about your client's brand. So if I'm Coca-Cola, I'm gonna be looking at our tagged images and seeing who's posting pictures with the classic Coke bottle. If I am Nike, I'm gonna be doing the same thing. I might be looking at hashtags to see who's using the branded Nike hashtags. And again, this can make really great social media content. Like I said, happy customers are your best salespeople. Just remember to get permission. You really should be getting written permission before reposting anything, even if they tag your brand. And lastly, V. V is for vanity metric. This is a topic you might hear me say a lot here on this YouTube channel. And what I mean when I say this is it's a metric or an insight that you get from your analytics that looks really pretty, but doesn't really tell you much about the health of your business. A good example that I can think of for this is views on Reels particularly, or reviews in general on most types of content. I know that when I post a Reel, because they're being prioritized in the algorithm and there's a separate feed for them, they tend to get a lot of views. I have views up 12,000 or more views, which is more than any likes that I generally get on my Instagram pictures. But after posting on Reels every day for a week and having a pretty consistent Reel strategy that's ongoing, I personally don't see a ton more traffic come in directly from Instagram. And I can see that by looking at my Google Analytics. It's nowhere near the amount of traffic that comes from a YouTube video, even if the YouTube video only has a thousand views. So the vanity metric, again, is the Reels views. It looks really pretty to look onto my page and see 12,000 views, but if they didn't go anywhere or they just quickly saw a second of it and then swiped away, is it really providing my business any true value? We can get into branding and the value of a strong brand at another time, but that's generally what I refer to as a vanity metric. Another common vanity metric is followers. There are plenty of brands that have a million followers or a hundred thousand followers that aren't really active and that aren't all that interested in what they have to do or more importantly, sell. And they're not actually making money off of that following. Meanwhile, there are people who have followings of just 500 people and are making a lot of sales and their followers are totally engaged. So it's important to choose KPIs that are truly relevant to your end goal or your client's end goal. If it's sales, choose conversion metrics like traffic and actual purchases. If it's awareness, then sure, maybe reach and views and followers could be a valid metric for you to focus on. All right, that is it for episode two of Social Media Management for Beginners. I put together a glossary for you. I will link it down below if you wanna download that and I will see you on Friday for episode three. If you have questions or topics you'd like me to talk about in future episodes of this series, let me know in the comments. Don't forget to subscribe and turn the bell notifications on so you don't miss out on the next episode. Thanks so much for tuning in. I'll see you then, bye. Bye.