Social Media Management Glossary
Social media community management defines a process by which your business engages with its audience on social media. This most immediately pertains to your own social media profiles, but can also include additional profiles you are monitoring like influencers or industry-related pages.
Social Media Management
Gamification
Gamification is the skill of understanding what game-based motivators may drive members and how to use those motivators to help members get value out of the community that they may not initially recognize. Often times gamification efforts appear in the form of points, badges, or ‘games’ that encourage gentle competition around engagement.
Social Media Management
Iceberg Effect
The theory that the visible activity of a community is only a very small part of the overall activity of a community.
Social Media Management
Inactive
An engagement profile. Members who have a profile in the community but who are inactive, which typically means they have not accessed the community in the past month.
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Internal Community
A community that exists within an organization, generally comprised of employees, alumni, stakeholders, etc.
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Intrinsic Motivators
Motivation that comes from inside an individual rather than from any outside rewards. These motivations come from the pleasure one gets from the task itself or from the sense of satisfaction in completing/working on a task. (Ex: Sense of pride/ownership).
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Lurker
An engagement profile. A member who only views content.
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Member Advocacy
Representing the needs expressed by the community or individual members to other stakeholders to ensure those needs are heard and addressed.
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Moderator
A person who moderates an Internet forum or online community discussion. Sometimes the Community Manager herself fulfills this role. Often times Community Managers/Community networks function with the assistance of volunteer moderators. These moderators could be considered champions/advocates. Examples of this work: Reddit is supported by teams of unpaid moderators who have a stake in the […]
Social Media Management
Narrative Development
Developing and bringing together written, graphic and/or multimedia elements into strong, simple storylines that help people understand and put information in context.
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New Member Welcoming
Building connections and creating content and programming to help members feel comfortable, connected and engaged in their first interactions within the community.
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On-Boarding
The process of bringing a new member up to speed in the community space. Community members, new community management employees and high-level executives all require on-boarding to help them maximize community value and functionality. Often happens in conjunction with New Member Welcoming, but is not the same.
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Playbook
A playbook is a living document that outlines and details the policies and practices that govern your community. Like a roadmap, a playbook exists for the use of your internal community team.
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Program Management
Managing a collection of responsibilities for a community or community program, which could include budget management, team management, vendor management, contractor management, reporting and P&L ownership.
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Roadmap
A roadmap is your plan for operations and tactics that will allow the community to fulfill its strategic goals. (Think: Where are you going and how will you get there?) Roadmap development requires the ability to link strategic goals to the tactics that will successfully achieve them, within the limits of the resources available.
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ROI
Return on Investment. Often discussed in conjunction with benchmarking. ROI is a relatively simple metric, calculated by dividing the benefit of an investment by its cost. ROI is a hot-topic in Community Management because most community programs find it to be a challenging metric to calculate.
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Scalability
Scalability is the capability of a system, network, organization or process to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to be enlarged in order to accommodate that growth.
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SEO
Search Engine Optimization. The process of developing and organizing content in a way that makes it easy to find via search.
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Silos
Channels of communication that prevent collaboration or the re-use of resources. The most commonly talked about silo is email because the information shared within emails is only accessible to those on the mailing list, not the entire organization/community.
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Start, Build, Grow
These are three stages of community development. You can use the CMM to assess the stages different aspects of your organization are operating at.
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Super User
A highly-bought-in member of the community. Super users “drink the kool aid”. They are regular contributors to community activities and generally become familiar faces on the platform. Community Managers often leverage Super Users for informal support, and tap them for involvement in formal Member Leadership Programs.
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Tagging
Generating, applying and managing the electronic tags or keywords used in your community to classify and describe content, to make it more findable and discoverable.