Common Digital and Social Marketing Terms

The below terms are commonly encountered when running campaigns on digital and social channels. While not exhaustive, the below will serve as a quick reference guide to inform you as you run campaigns.

AMA
Short for “Ask Me Anything” this is a form of engagement invented and popularized by the social media platform Reddit. Now common on other platforms, it is a method of engagement in which celebrities, KOLs, and other subject matter experts source and answer questions from other users in real time.

Audience
The intended group of social media users who you would like to reach in your campaign. Audience definition is crucial to ensuring your campaign is effective in its goal. For campaigns that involved paid promotion, targeting parameters must be defined in advance to ensure the right people see the content.

Block
A feature started by Twitter and implemented by other platforms in which one can block other users on a social platform from commenting, direct messaging, or tagging them in posts or comments. This is now a common feature on all platforms. Novartis can leverage this feature in cases where “trolls” or malicious users spam a digital property.

Caption
A description that accompanies a photo or video post on most social channels. This most commonly refers the block of text that appears below an Instagram posts. Cations offer a way to provide context to visual assets and direct users to an external site.

Click-through rate (CTR)
A performance metric most commonly used to determine the effectiveness of digital ads, most commonly on social channels. It indicates the number of people who viewed Novartis content, clicked on the content, and visited the external site to which the content drove. Higher click through rate indicate a more successful campaign. The metric indicates the percent of users who clicked out of the total number to whom the content was served.

Community management
The term given to the practice of monitoring and engaging with comments, likes, etc… on owned social channels. Community management is crucial for Novartis as it is necessary to identify and report adverse events.

Benchmarking
The act of comparing performance metrics on owned channels to those of the industry as a whole or to those of competitors. Benchmarks can provide context or a reference point to which one can compare campaign performance.

Competitor sentiment
Certain digital tools allow the monitoring of comments on various social platforms and analyzing them to determine how users feel about a certain brand or product. This practice can help determine if users feel positively, negatively or neutrally towards items. Monitoring this metric over time can beneficial in understanding how certain events impact sentiment.

Content management system (CMS)
A system that lets users schedule content on multiple social channels simultaneously through the web. These platforms are essential in managing multiple channels and posting regular content. May even provide metrics on post performance and can be helpful in tracking content over time.

Conversion
A conversion is the basic unit of a particular objective on social or digital campaigns. For example, one website click is one conversion on a campaign designed to generate website traffic. One like is one conversion on a campaign designed to generate engagements on a social post. The conversion varies depending on the objective of the campaign.

Cost per click (CPC)
A performance metric that indicates the cost of one website click generated on a paid social or paid digital campaign. Promoted content with a traffic objective will encourage users to click on certain content. The ad sponsor must pay for that ad to be placed in front of the user. If a campaign with a certain budget generates X amounts of clicks, the cost per click is the total clicks (X) divided by the total budget spent on the campaign. A lower cost per click indicates more effective content that resonate better with audiences. CPCs vary from social platform to social platform.

Cost per engagement (CPE)
Like cost per click, this metric shows the cost paid for each individual engagement in a campaign.

Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM)
This metrics shows how much budget was spent to show content 1000 times. A lowers CPM means the content resonates with more users, while a higher CPM indicates the target audiences does not find the content compelling.

Direct message
A private message on social channels from one user to another that is only visible to those two users. Private messages are a great way to have private conversations or to move a public conversation in comments into a private conversation.

Display ad
Visual or text ads that are delivered on displays, most commonly computers or mobile devices, that appear on websites. The most common of these are banner ads delivered on websites as users go from website to website.

Engagement
Any action taken by social media users in which they like, comment, retweet or interact with a particular piece of content.

Engagement rate
A metric that shows how engaging a piece of content was. Higher engagement rates mean more engaging, effective content. This rate is presented as a percentage and indicates the number of users who engaged with a piece of content from the total number of uses to whom the content was shown.

Facebook Live
A live video stream that is shared by a user with their followers. Facebook live and live videos on other platforms generally produce better engagement and viewership than traditional content. This is due to the authentic nature of the content and the lack of editing/curation of the content – given users a sense of direct experience with the videos subject matter.

Facebook Reactions
Users can now “react” to Facebook posts with more than just likes. They can “love”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad”, and more. Each reaction is considered an engagement.

Geotargeting
A feature on many social media platforms that allows users to share their content with geographically defined audiences. Instead of sending a generic message for the whole world to see, you can refine the messaging and language of your content to better connect with people in specific cities, countries, and regions. You can also filter your audience by language.

Hashtag
Popularized by Twitter, this is any word or short phrase the follows a “#” symbol. This hashtag will then allow the user’s social post to be found by others who are looking at that hashtag. Hashtags are very common now and most awareness days and conferences have dedicated hashtags. It is beneficial to use these hashtags in your posts to ensure it appears alongside other posts about the same topic.

Impressions
An impression is any one view of a piece of content. Most often, impressions are used a metric of how many times a post of piece of content was viewed over the course of a campaign.

Social Influencer
Any social media account or user that has a significant following (usually at least in the tens of thousands) and that often posts content about a particular theme. Influencers often partner with brands to post “sponsored” content on their feeds. Sponsored influencer content tends to have a higher engagement rate that traditional social or digital ads. Users find influencer content to be more authentic and reliable than ads.

Key performance indicator (KPI)
Any metrics that provides insight into the performance of a campaign or piece of content. CPC, CPE, and CPM are all KPIs that can be used to monitor campaign success. It is best to use KPIs that are relevant to the campaign at hand. For example, a cost per engagement (CPE) metric should be used for campaigns that are designed to generate interactions with social users.

Like
The simplest engagement possible on social channel in with a user indicates they like a piece of content.

Lookalike audience
Most often used in Facebook targeting, this is a tactic in which a social platform creates an audience of users who match the particular parameters of a smaller audience that is provided. For example, if Facebook is given a small group of 1000 users who have the desired parameters of your target audiences (demographics, locations, etc.) it will then find a lookalike audiences of thousands or millions of users who have those same parameters.

Mention
When another social user mentions your social channel in their posts or in a comment is a mention.

Organic reach
The number of unique people who have seen a particular piece of content or series of content organically in their feeds without any paid promotion.

Paid Reach
The number of unique people who have seen a particular piece of content or series of content that has appeared in their feed as a result of paid promotion of that content.

Pinned tweet
A tweet that stays at the top of a user’s profile regardless of future tweets.

Retargeting
The act of targeting social or digital users who have already interacted with your brand on any digital platform. Most commonly, this includes capturing the data of those who have visited a website, such as Novartis.com, and then targeting those users with ads or promoted content on social channels or with display ads as they go to other websites.

Reply
A response to any comment, tweet, or social post.

Retweet
The act of one user sharing another user’s tweet in their own feed and to their own follower base.

Sentiment
The general tone/favorability of users who interact with your content. Monitoring sentiment over time allows one to gauge how actions taken by a brand or organization resonate with users.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The tactic of increasing the visibility of a brand or website in results on search engines. Most commonly, this is involves increasing the ranking of your website in search results on Google. Good SEO will result in your website being on the first page and ideally the top results for search on particular key words. For example, when a user searches “oncology”, ideally Novartis Oncology would be a top result.

Share of voice
A metric that show how much off all the content that is being posted by users around the topic of your brand references your brand rather than competitors. For example, if 200 of a 1000 posts that reference oncology treatments are about Novartis Oncology, and the other 800 are about competitors, then NVS has 20% of the share of voice.

Sponsored posts
Content that has been “promoted” with paid support to be placed into users feeds who do not organically follow a brand’s social channel. Sponsored posts always indicate some for of paid promotion and are usually shown to users who do not normally follow or engage with a brand.

Stories
A relatively new form of social content that was introduced by Snapchat and popularized by Instagram (now found on Facebook as well). Unlike other posts, stories are temporary and automatically delete after 24 hours.

Twitter card
A specific tweet format that has a clear headline and external website destination. Twitter cards are best used for paid tweets that send users to external sources as part of a paid campaign.

User-generated content (UGC)
Content generated by average users but is reposted by a brand on the brand’s feed. For example, if a user shares a photo on their Twitter feed, and Novartis then shares that photos on the Novartis Twitter feed, this is known as sharing UGC. UGC almost always generates better engagement than owned content and is a great way to add authenticity to your channels. It is very important to have written permission from the user before sharing their content.