5 Social Media Terms and What they Signify

While the majority of us have adopted social media as a standard form of communication, plenty of us still have no clue what certain terms mean. Luckily, these terms are generally easy to understand once you’re given a push in the right direction. This guide should serve as a first step to understanding social media terms.

1. Tag

Tag is one of those words that may refer to several different things, depending on how it’s used. Often, a tag refers to the use of a keyword in a blog or other post. These keywords help ensure that search engines relate your post to the relevant topics.

Tag might also refer to the act of tagging a friend in photos on Facebook. This basically means that you link someone to a photo that they are in. This feature has been around for years but it’s becoming more sophisticated as it now uses facial recognition.

The most recent form of tagging actually refers to mentioning friends in your posts and status updates. Now, if you tag them in your updates, they will be informed of your post and it will show up on their wall for all of their other friends to see.

2. Troll

A troll in this case is a person that uses social media as a way to provoke people. Trolls often make taunting or offensive comments on pages or in groups in order to provoke anger.

3. Friend

We all know what a friend is in the conventional sense, but in social media it can be used as a verb. When you add a person as a friend over a social network, many users refer to this as “friending” someone.

4. Stream

Stream, like tag, can have a few different meanings. When it’s used as a verb it pertains to a constant streaming of information, like a webcast. In the form of a noun it typically refers to the information and updates that show up on someone’s Twitter or Facebook home page.

5. At mention

At mentions, or @ mentions, are used on Twitter and they are very similar to Facebook’s new tagging system for status updates. This allows you to mention someone in your Tweet and notify him or her of your post.

Although social media terms can often be confusing, this guide can certainly help clear up some of the confusion. If you’d like even more social media definitions, take a look at this article.