Social media marketing has been essential to gain expertise in for marketing professionals. As we go through a period of unprecedented growth in the technology marketing industry, one of the side effects is the creation of new, and sometimes confusing, social media marketing jargon. Have a look at some useful social media marketing terms used in a marketers daily life:
– Call to Action: A call to Action (CTA) is an instruction for a social media user to entice the user into actions such as clicking on a link (“visit a store”,”call now”), following a profile and buying a product. An obvious CTA would be to ask users for their contact information. The smarter the CTA, the better the user compliance. An example of a smart CTA would be to ask users to customize their products before buying them.
– Dark Social: This is a term coined by Alexis C. Madrigal from ‘The Atlantic’. It refers to the online sharing that takes place outside of what can be measured by Web Analytics. This majorly occurs when a link is ‘shared’/sent via online chat or electronic mail. Dark Social has been posing a problem for online marketers as this huge portion of social sharing may go neglected.
– Lead Scoring: This is a technique which is used by Marketers to rank the percieved value a “lead” or user represents to any firm. This is used to determine the returning function of the leads. These models can be explicit i.e. based on information such as company size or geographic location, or implicit i.e. based on user behavior such as Web site visitsor number of clicks. Lead scoring methodology helps in increased sales efficiency, increased marketing effectiveness and tighter marketing and sales alignment.
– Organic vs. Paid: When a search engine returns its results it gives us both organic and paid listings. Organic or “natural” search results, is what Search Engine Optimization is about. They appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to non-organic or paid listings, which are basically advertisements, where the Web site owners have their web pages displayed for a particular keyword searches. Search engines set apart paid listings from organic listings.
Organic vs Paid search
– Vanity URL: These are unique Web site addresses which are created because they are easy to remember, share and use. Vanity URL’s are branded for marketing purposes. Many social media website compete for Vanity URL’s because of it’s advantages. Services such as bit.ly and tinyurl are therefore popular. Apart from the fact that they are easy to remember and share, they empower online sharing.
– Twitter Mining: Twitter aggregates enormous amounts of data that are impossible to go through manually. Luckily, mining tools like Dataminr allow marketers to analyze these large chunks of data easily in search of valuable and profitable intelligence.
Twitter Mining
– Automation: Automated social actions like scheduled posts and comments save marketers plenty of time and allow smooth operations. There can be a urge to automate a lot of processes, but good marketers know how to automate wisely.
– Cross-Channel: Users generally use ore than one social media platform and it has become extremely important for marketers to understand the value of sharing content across multiple platforms and from one platform to another. Example: While running a short-term campaign, often cross-referencing from one to another can be productive in broadening the audience reach and in-turn the conversation.
– Social CRM: CRM refers to Customer Relationship Management. Social CRM refers to use of social media services, techniques and technology which focus on collecting and managing static customer data, past purchase information, , demographics in addition to data derived from social networks where a users publicly shares information. Social CRM’s help in keeping a full audit history and are hence useful for marketers.