There are A LOT of social media platforms, and with these come all sorts of new lingos and terms when referencing their features. There is some overlap, but it can be confusing at times to navigate through the ocean of terminologies. As a business owner, your presence on social media is vital to maintaining and growing your business.  Here is a guide to help you along the way:

1. Facebook

• Profiles: These are for non-commercial use and represent individual people. If you create an account, you can add friends, and if you follow other profiles, you can see their public updates.
• Pages: These look similar to personal profiles, but offer unique tools for businesses, brands, and organizations and are managed by people who have personal profiles. You can ’like’ a Page to see updates from that business in your Newsfeed. Businesses would always choose to create a page and not a profile for their social activity
• Business Manager: This is a platform that lets businesses more securely share and control access to their ad accounts, Pages, and other assets on Facebook.
• Creator Studio: This is a tool that allows you to track and manage content performance, further across different Pages if you manage many. There is a scheduling tool and an inbox that allows you to manage comments and messages across Facebook and Instagram.
• Facebook Ads: These are a means to amplify and target content to specific audiences for a fee
• Carousel: Posts or ads in this format can display up to 10 images or videos at one time. You can highlight different products, showcase specific details about one product, service, or promotion, or tell a story about your brand.
• Events: Users can make use of this resource to alert people to upcoming events or occasions so that they can reach many people quickly.
• Watch: This is a free video-on-demand service you access through the Facebook site and app. It allows creators to upload their own short- and long-form videos, but it also includes original comedy, drama, and news programming.
• Live: This allows people, public figures, and Pages to stream and share live videos with their followers and friends.
• Messenger: Marketing professionals can use this tool to communicate with customers through private messages.

2. YouTube

• Channel:  The channel serves your profile page, showing the account name description, the public videos the member uploads, and any user information the member enters.
• Subscribe: By subscribing to a particular channel or user on YouTube, you can receive instant updates whenever new content from that source appears.
• Title: This is the name that you give to each video you upload. Keywords are important here as well to ensure your content ranks well within search.
• Tag: Adding categories through tags also helps your video to reach relevant audiences.
• Description: This is a keyword-rich caption that appears underneath your video. Often businesses use this area to provide a strong call to action. As well as a link to a website, or other social media platforms.
• Thumbnail: This is the custom image you can select as the cover of your video. This can either be a still from your video or a unique image uploaded to YouTube.

3. Instagram

• Feed: The algorithm-based home feed shows the photos and videos which Instagram then thinks are most interesting to the user
• Search and Explore: This is where you can discover content of interest from accounts that you don’t yet follow.
• Filters: There are a variety of options for enhancing photos before publishing them.
• Stories: These are ephemeral short-form content that shows in the home feed and on a user’s profile for 24 hours. You can customize them with filters and GIF stickers.
• Highlights: This gives you the opportunity to save Stories in folders on your profile so they remain longer than 24 hours.

4. Twitter

• Tweet: This is the communication unit on Twitter. It is limited to 280 characters. However, the most common length of a tweet is just 33 characters. Only about 1% of tweets hit the 280-character limit.
• Retweet: This is a tweet from another user that is shared publicly with your followers.
• Quote Tweets: These are retweets with additional comments added (up to 140 characters) before posting.
• Reply: This is a direct response to another user’s tweet which begins with the @ symbol. Then followed by their username and then your response. As a result, some replies in a conversation don’t appear in chronological order. Replies are also grouped by sub-conversations to show the best content first. Then based on several factors such as interactions and likes.
• Geo-tagging: This is the act of stamping the location details of where a tweet was created which enables users to search for tweets within a given area. You can then enable or disable this.

• Moments: These are curated stories showcasing the very best of what’s happening on Twitter, customized and editable to show the current topics that are popular or relevant to the user. You can only create them on the desktop.
• Mute Words: This feature allows users to stop receiving notifications for mentions based on specific words. As well as phrases, usernames, emojis, or hashtags.
• Twitter Trend: This is a particular subject or conversation topic that is popular around the globe or a specific area used to classify tweets on the platform and increase their visibility.
• Twitter Card: This is an enhanced version of a tweet that enables the attachment of media to tweets for the purpose of driving traffic to your website. There are four types of cards: the Summary Card, the Summary Card with Large Image, the App Card and the Player Card.
• Periscope: This is a live-streaming social app built into Twitter that lets users broadcast and further explore the world through live video and social interactions.

5. LinkedIn

• Connections: Connections are people in your network. Your network is made up of your 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections. As well as fellow members of your LinkedIn groups. Your communication options for your extended network vary based on the degree of connection.
• InMail: These are private emails on LinkedIn, available only to Premium accounts, sent to fellow professionals without the need of an introduction, contact information, or connections.
• Company Pages: These are specific pages for an organization to post or promote content through paid campaigns
• Premium Accounts: These are paid-for subscriptions utilized for the purposes of career progression, recruitment, lead gen, business insights, and learning.
• SlideShare: This is LinkedIn’s content hosting platform that works as a web service, letting you upload presentations, videos, infographics, and PDFs to share with everyone. It is a very convenient way to house all your brand’s shareable content in one place.
• LinkedIn Group: This is a page that supports specific, topical discussions moderated by group owners and managers.

6. Pinterest

• Pin: Pins are ideas that people on Pinterest create, find, and save from around the web. If you click on the Pin, you can visit the website to see how to make it or where to buy it.
• Board: The Pins you save live on your boards. Name your boards and arrange them on your profile however you like.
• Group Boards: These are collaborative boards with other Pinterest users, often used to share ideas and plans.
• Rich Pins: Rich Pins provide more context about an idea because they show extra information directly on a Pin. There are four types of Rich Pin: app, product, recipe, and article.
• Pinterest Browser Button: This is a browser extension that allows users to save ideas from around the web to a Board with one click.