Free resource

Every word people use on social, explained.

187 terms, explained the way someone who does this for a living would explain them, including the ones people get wrong all the time. No sign-up needed.

Advertising

Ads Manager: The full advertising console for a platform, where you control objectives, audiences, placements, budgets, creative and reporting. Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest each have one. Nearly all serious paid work happens here rather than through in-app promote buttons.
Advantage+Facebook: Meta's automated campaign products, where the system chooses audiences, placements and creative combinations with minimal manual targeting. Often efficient, but it hides which audience produced results, so keep some structured campaigns running if you need to learn anything.
Attribution window: The period after seeing or clicking an ad within which a conversion is credited to it, such as seven-day click and one-day view. Longer windows flatter results. Always state the window when reporting, and use the same one month to month.
Bid strategy: How the platform spends your budget in the auction: highest volume, cost per result goal, bid cap or value optimisation. Start with the automatic option while you gather data, then add caps only when you know what a result is worth.
Boosting: Paying to promote an existing post from the app itself. Quick, but deliberately limited: fewer objectives, coarse targeting, usually optimised for engagement rather than sales. Ads Manager can promote the same post with proper objectives and costs no more.
Budget pacing: How evenly spend is spread across a day or campaign. Platforms deliberately hold back budget for better opportunities later, so an underspending campaign is often pacing rather than broken. Constant budget edits reset learning and make pacing worse.
Campaign objective: What you tell the platform to optimise for: awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion or sales. This choice determines who is shown your ad more than your targeting does, so picking traffic when you want purchases wastes budget.
Campaign structure: The three-level hierarchy of most ad platforms. Campaign holds the objective and often the budget; ad set or ad group holds audience, placements, schedule and bidding; ad holds the creative. Knowing which lever sits at which level prevents most setup errors.
Conversions API (CAPI): A server-to-server connection sending conversion events from your systems directly to an ad platform, alongside or instead of the browser pixel. It recovers events lost to blockers and browser limits, and it still requires a valid lawful basis under UK data protection law.
Creative testing: Running variants to learn what works, changing one meaningful element at a time such as hook, format or offer. Creative is now the main performance lever, since targeting is increasingly automated. Test concepts against each other, not button colours.
Custom audience: An audience built from data you already hold or own: a customer list, website visitors, app users, or people who engaged with your content. Uploading customer lists needs a lawful basis and appropriate transparency, not just a tick in the platform's box.
Frequency: Average number of times each person saw your ad, calculated as impressions divided by reach. Rising frequency with falling click-through means fatigue: refresh the creative rather than the targeting, because the audience has simply seen this one too often.
Learning phase: The initial period where the delivery system gathers data before performance stabilises, typically around fifty optimisation events per ad set per week. Significant edits restart it, which is why patient campaigns usually beat heavily tinkered ones.
Lookalike audience: An audience the platform builds by finding users resembling a source list you supply. Quality depends entirely on the source: two hundred high-value customers produce a better lookalike than fifty thousand mixed website visitors. Narrower percentages mean closer matches.
Pixel: A snippet of tracking code on your website that reports visitor actions back to an ad platform for measurement, audience building and optimisation. Browser restrictions and consent rules mean pixel data alone is now incomplete, which is why server-side tracking exists.
Placement: Where an ad can appear: feed, Stories, Reels, search, in-stream video, audience networks. Each has different dimensions and user intent. Automatic placements usually deliver cheaper results but need creative supplied in both vertical and square or horizontal crops.
Retargeting: Advertising to people who have already interacted with you, such as site visitors or video viewers. Efficient on paper because these people were already close to buying, which also means reported returns overstate the sales it genuinely caused.
Spark AdsTikTok: TikTok's format for promoting an existing organic post, including a creator's, while keeping its original handle, comments and likes. It performs better than studio-made ads because it looks native, and it requires an authorisation code from the post owner.
Whitelisting: A creator granting a brand permission to run ads from the creator's own handle, sometimes called allowlisting or partnership ads. The ad carries the creator's face and name, which usually lifts performance, and must be covered by a written agreement and paid usage rights.

Algorithms

Cold start: The problem a system has ranking content from an account it knows little about. It resolves by testing your post with small audiences and expanding if signals are good. It is why early posts feel erratic and why consistency matters more than perfection.
Content velocity: How quickly a post gathers engagement in its first hour or so relative to how many people saw it. Fast, strong early signals encourage the system to widen distribution, which is the real reason publishing when your audience is awake helps.
Engagement bait: Explicitly asking for interactions with no value attached, such as like if you agree or tag three friends. Platforms have detected and demoted it for years, and audiences have learnt to ignore it, so it now costs reach rather than buying it.
Engagement pod: A group that agrees to like and comment on each other's posts to fake early momentum. It breaches most platform terms, teaches the system to show your work to an audience that will never buy, and reliably degrades reach over time.
For You Page (FYP)TikTok: TikTok's main feed, built almost entirely from predicted interest rather than who you follow. This is why new accounts can reach large audiences quickly, and equally why a strong run of reach can stop without anything being wrong.
Ineligible for recommendation: The documented state where a post still appears to followers and on your profile but is withheld from Explore, the For You feed or suggested content, usually for borderline, unoriginal or restricted material. Instagram and TikTok both let you check this in account tools.
Negative signal: Actions telling the system to show less of something: not interested, hide, unfollow, mute, report, or simply scrolling straight past. These matter as much as positive signals, which is why posting more often to a disengaged audience can reduce reach.
Originality signal: Systems that detect reposted, watermarked or minimally edited duplicate content and rank the original above the copies. Instagram has stated it replaces reposts with the original account's version in recommendations, so aggregator accounts now lose reach rather than gain it.
Ranking signal: An input a recommendation system uses to predict whether you will value a post: watch time, completion, saves, sends, your history with the account, topic, recency and language. Platforms publish rough lists but never the weightings.
Reach decay: The normal pattern of a post accumulating most of its reach quickly then tailing off. Windows differ: hours on X, a day or two on Instagram, weeks or months on YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok, which is why reporting periods must match the platform.
Recommendation system: The machine learning pipeline that shortlists candidate posts, scores each for predicted engagement, then ranks and filters them for one person at that moment. Understanding it as prediction rather than punishment explains most of what feels unfair about reach.
Seeding: Deliberately putting content in front of a chosen initial audience, for example sending product to creators or sharing a post into relevant communities, so the recommendation system sees strong early signals from the right people rather than a random sample.
Shadowban: The belief that platforms secretly hide your posts without telling you. Largely a myth as commonly described: most reach drops are normal variance or weak content. Real mechanisms do exist and are documented, such as content being ineligible for recommendation, and they are visible in account status tools.

Commerce

AOV (average order value): Total revenue divided by number of orders. Raising it through bundles, thresholds for free delivery or upsells is often easier than winning more customers, and it directly changes how much you can afford to pay for an acquisition.
Affiliate marketing: Paying a commission on sales made through a creator's unique link or code. Low risk because you pay on results, but it needs clear disclosure: affiliate content is advertising under UK rules and must be labelled even without an upfront fee.
Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who complete the desired action. Social traffic converts lower than search because intent is lower, so compare social-sourced sessions against social, not against people who typed your brand name into Google.
GMV (gross merchandise value): The total value of goods sold through a channel before deducting commission, refunds, returns and discounts. Commonly quoted in social commerce because it flatters. Net revenue after returns is the number that pays your invoices.
In-app checkout: Completing payment inside the social app instead of on the retailer's site. It removes friction and lifts conversion, but the platform owns the customer relationship and the data, so plan how you will capture contact details separately.
Live shopping: Selling during a live stream with products pinned for instant purchase. Works through demonstration, scarcity and answering objections in real time. Successful sellers run long, frequent streams; a one-off hour with no audience built beforehand rarely sells anything.
Product catalogue: The structured feed of your products, with images, prices, stock and identifiers, connected to a platform's commerce and advertising tools. It powers shopping tags and dynamic ads, and its quality caps everything downstream, so fix titles and images at source.
Product tagging: Attaching catalogue items to a post, Story or video so viewers can tap through to buy. Requires an approved shop and a connected product feed. Tag only what is genuinely shown, because mismatched tags damage trust and can breach platform commerce policies.
Social commerce: Buying and selling that happens inside social apps rather than on a separate website. It compresses discovery and purchase into one session, which suits impulse-priced products far better than considered or high-value purchases.
TikTok ShopTikTok: TikTok's in-app marketplace, where products are tagged in videos and lives and bought without leaving the app. Well established in the UK. Sellers pay commission, and discovery depends heavily on affiliate creators rather than on the brand's own posts.

Content

AMA (ask me anything)Reddit: A Reddit format where someone opens a thread and answers questions live. Run badly it becomes a PR disaster in public; run well it earns genuine credibility. Read the subreddit's AMA rules first and never post one that reads as marketing.
Alt text: A short written description of an image for screen reader users, entered in advanced settings on most platforms. Describe what matters in the picture rather than stuffing keywords. Required in practice for accessibility and a reasonable adjustment many public bodies expect.
Aspect ratio: The shape of your frame, expressed width to height. 9:16 is full-screen vertical for short video, 4:5 is the tallest feed image on Instagram, 16:9 is horizontal for YouTube and 1:1 is square. Shoot for the tallest ratio you will need.
B-roll: Supplementary footage cut over the main shot: hands working, the product close up, the street outside. It hides edits, illustrates what is being said and keeps the eye busy, which is why talking-head videos with B-roll retain better.
BoardPinterest: A themed collection where Pins are saved on Pinterest. Boards tell the system what a Pin is about, so name them in plain search terms such as small kitchen storage ideas rather than something clever and unsearchable.
Caption: The written text accompanying a post. It gives context, carries the call to action and is read by the platform's own understanding of your topic. First line is effectively a headline, because everything after it is hidden behind a more link.
Carousel: A multi-image or multi-video post people swipe through. Carousels earn extra watch time and saves because each swipe is a small commitment, and some platforms re-show slide two to people who did not engage the first time.
ChaptersYouTube: Timestamped sections in a YouTube description that split the video into labelled parts on the progress bar. They improve the viewing experience, help search surface the relevant moment, and let you see in analytics exactly where people leave.
Document postLinkedIn: A LinkedIn post format that displays a PDF as a swipeable carousel. Reliably strong for dwell time because readers swipe slowly, and useful for frameworks, checklists and data. Design for phone screens: large type, one idea per page.
DuetTikTok: A TikTok format placing your video side by side with someone else's original, playing together. Used for reactions, before-and-afters and expert commentary. It borrows the original's audience, which is why replying to a bigger account can outperform posting alone.
Green screenTikTok: An in-app effect that drops an image, article or web page behind you while you talk to camera. The cheapest way to make a commentary or explainer video visual, and one of the most reliably watched formats on short-form platforms.
Hook: The first one to three seconds of a video, or the first line of a caption, that stops the scroll. It should state the payoff or create a gap the viewer needs closed. Most videos fail here, not in the body.
Jump cut: Cutting out pauses and stumbles within a single continuous shot so the speaker appears to jump slightly. The standard pace-raising tool in short form. Overdone it becomes exhausting, so vary the rhythm rather than cutting every breath.
Live stream: Broadcasting in real time. Long watch sessions and direct comments make Live strong for trust, launches and Q and As, and several platforms push notifications when you go on. Announce it beforehand; spontaneous streams usually find nobody there.
Photo modeTikTok: TikTok's swipeable image post format, where stills play with a soundtrack. Cheap to produce and surprisingly strong for reach, because viewers linger on each frame and watch time accrues while they read rather than while they watch video.
Pin (Pinterest)Pinterest: A single saved image or video linking back to a source page. Unlike feed posts, Pins keep earning traffic for months because Pinterest behaves more like a visual search engine than a social network, so titles and descriptions should read as searchable.
Quote postX: Resharing someone's post with your own comment attached, rather than a plain repost. It reaches your audience with your framing on top. Quoting to criticise still amplifies the original, which is why many communities prefer screenshots or no engagement at all.
ReelsInstagram: Instagram's short vertical video format, distributed heavily to non-followers through recommendation. Reels are the main growth surface on Instagram; feed posts and Stories mostly serve people who already follow you, so the two have different jobs.
Repin (save)Pinterest: When someone saves your Pin to their own board on Pinterest. It is the platform's core distribution mechanism: saves push a Pin to new audiences and keep it circulating, so save rate matters more there than likes or comments.
Repurposing: Reworking one piece of content for other formats and platforms: a webinar becomes clips, a carousel, a newsletter and quote graphics. Reworking is the key word. Exporting a TikTok with its watermark to Reels is recycling, not repurposing, and performs badly.
Safe zone: The central area of a vertical video not covered by interface elements such as the caption, profile button and share icons. Keep text and faces inside it, roughly the middle 80 percent vertically, or the app will hide your key message.
ShortsYouTube: YouTube's vertical short-form video format, surfaced in its own feed and beneath long-form videos. Monetised from a shared advertising pool rather than per-video ads, so Shorts RPMs are much lower than long-form, but they are strong for subscriber discovery.
SnapSnapchat: A photo or short video sent on Snapchat, traditionally disappearing after viewing. Snapchat's culture is private and conversational rather than broadcast, so brands work there through Stories, Spotlight, lenses and advertising rather than by accumulating followers.
Status (WhatsApp)WhatsApp Business: WhatsApp's 24-hour Stories equivalent, visible to your contacts. Combined with Business profiles, catalogues and click-to-WhatsApp ads it is a serious commerce channel in many markets, and in the UK it is mainly used for customer service and bookings.
StitchTikTok: A TikTok format that clips up to five seconds of someone else's video as the opening of your own. Ideal for answering a question or correcting a claim. Creators can disable stitching, and your response must stand alone if the clip is muted.
Stories: Full-screen vertical posts that disappear after 24 hours, shown to a slice of your existing followers rather than to new audiences. Best used for behind-the-scenes, polls, questions and link taps, not for content you want discovered.
SubredditReddit: A topic-based community on Reddit with its own moderators and rules, written as r/name. Each one has distinct norms about self-promotion, and moderators remove brand posts freely, so read the sidebar rules before posting anything commercial.
Subtitles vs captions: Subtitles transcribe speech for people who can hear but need the words; captions also describe relevant sound such as music or a door slamming, for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Auto-generated versions need editing for names, jargon and accents.
ThreadX: A chain of connected posts used to tell a longer story in a short-post format. Each post must work on its own because people enter mid-chain. The opening post carries all the distribution risk, so write it last.
ThumbnailYouTube: The still image representing a video before it is played. On YouTube the thumbnail and title work as a pair and are the single biggest lever on click-through rate. Test faces, contrast and three or four words maximum.
Trending audio: A sound gaining rapid use on a platform, which can give an early lift to reach. Two catches: the window is usually days not weeks, and brand accounts generally cannot legally use popular commercial music, only cleared commercial libraries.

Core

Algorithm: Shorthand for the ranking and recommendation systems that decide what each person sees. There is no single algorithm; each surface (feed, Stories, search, Explore) has its own. It predicts what you will watch, save or reply to, then orders accordingly.
Bio: The short profile description under your name. It is read by people deciding whether to follow and by platform search. Say who you help, what you do and where you are based, in that order, rather than listing adjectives about yourself.
Brand voice: The consistent personality of everything a brand publishes: vocabulary, sentence length, humour, how it handles complaints. Documented properly it includes what the brand never says. Voice stays constant; tone shifts with context, so a bereavement reply differs from a launch post.
CTA (call to action): The single instruction you want the viewer to follow: comment a word, save this, tap the link, book a call. One CTA per post outperforms three. On platforms that suppress outbound links, make the CTA an on-platform action instead.
Cadence: How often you publish on each channel. Consistency matters more than volume: a sustainable three posts a week beats daily posting for a fortnight then silence. Set cadence by what the team can hold during a busy month, not a quiet one.
Community management: Replying to comments and messages, welcoming new members, handling complaints and setting the tone of the space around your content. It is a distinct job from content creation, and it is usually what converts audience into customers.
Content calendar: The planning document mapping what goes out, where and when, usually a few weeks ahead with room left for reactive posts. It exists to protect quality and approvals, not to remove spontaneity, so leave roughly a fifth of slots unfilled.
Content pillar: One of three to five recurring themes a channel posts about, chosen so the audience knows what to expect and the team never faces a blank page. Typical pillars mix education, proof, personality and promotion in a deliberate ratio.
DM (direct message): A private one-to-one or group message inside a platform. Increasingly where the real value sits: sends and replies are strong ranking signals, and most commercial enquiries from social arrive here rather than by email, so response time matters.
Engagement: Any interaction with a post: likes, comments, shares, saves, clicks, profile visits. Platforms weight these very differently. A share or save signals far more genuine value than a like, which is why chasing likes alone rarely improves reach.
Evergreen content: Material that stays useful for months or years, such as how-to explainers, rather than reacting to a moment. On recommendation-led platforms evergreen posts can resurface long after publishing, so it repays more production effort than trend-chasing does.
Feed: The scrolling stream of posts an app shows you. On almost every platform it is no longer chronological: a ranking system orders it by predicted interest, so two people following identical accounts will see different posts in a different order.
Follower: An account that has subscribed to yours. A far weaker asset than most people assume: typical organic posts reach a small single-digit to low double-digit percentage of followers, because recommendation now outranks subscription on most feeds.
Handle: Your unique @username on a platform, used in mentions and in your profile URL. Distinct from display name, which can be anything. Handles are first come, first served, so secure the same one everywhere early, even on platforms you do not yet use.
Hashtag: A word or phrase prefixed with # that groups posts by topic and feeds the platform a hint about subject matter. Their discovery value has fallen sharply as systems learned to read captions, audio and on-screen text. Use three to five relevant ones, not thirty.
Impressions: The total number of times your content was displayed, counting repeat views by the same person. One follower who sees your Story three times generates three impressions but one reach. Impressions divided by reach gives frequency, useful for spotting fatigue.
Link in bio: The clickable URL on your profile, often pointed at a landing page listing several destinations. Every extra tap loses people, so send traffic straight to the one page that matters during a campaign rather than to a menu of ten links.
Organic vs paid: Organic reach is distribution you get for free because the system chose to show your post; paid reach is bought through an ads platform. Most brands need both: organic proves what resonates, paid buys predictable volume behind the winners.
Reach: The number of unique accounts that saw your content at least once. Always lower than impressions. Reach is the honest audience-size number; use it as the denominator when you calculate engagement rate so returning viewers do not distort the figure.
Social listening: Monitoring public conversation for mentions of your brand, competitors, category or issue, including posts that never tag you. Used for reputation alerts, customer insight and content ideas. Tools include Brandwatch and Sprout; basic listening is possible free via platform search.
Social media manager: The role that owns strategy, planning, publishing, community management and reporting for a brand's channels. In small organisations it also covers filming, editing and paid media; job adverts vary wildly, so read the listed duties rather than the title.
Tagging: Linking another account to your post by @mentioning it in the caption, on the image, or in a collaboration field. Tagging notifies that account and can surface your post on their profile. Tagging brands you have no relationship with is a common and ineffective habit.
UGC (user-generated content): Content made by customers or the public rather than the brand, historically unpaid and unprompted. Confusingly, the industry now also uses UGC to mean paid creator-shot content licensed for a brand's own channels, which is not user-generated at all.
Vanity metric: A number that looks impressive but does not connect to a business outcome, such as raw follower count or impressions. Useful only as a supporting figure. Ask what decision the number would change; if nothing would change, stop reporting it.
Verification: The badge next to an account name. Originally a free authenticity check for notable accounts; on several platforms it is now largely a paid subscription feature, so it signals a payment more than it signals identity or importance.
content strategy: A content strategy is the plan behind what a brand posts on social media: the themes, formats, and posting cadence chosen to support its goals, rather than posting ad hoc. Practitioners use it to keep output consistent and purposeful, and it's also what you assess when benchmarking competitors.

Creator

Brand deal: A paid partnership where a creator produces agreed content for a brand. The contract should state deliverables, deadlines, approval rounds, usage rights, exclusivity, payment terms and disclosure requirements. Anything left vague becomes unpaid extra work later.
Creator economy: The market of individuals earning from audiences they own, through brand deals, platform payouts, affiliate commission, subscriptions and their own products. In practice most creator income comes from brand partnerships rather than from platform advertising revenue shares.
Exclusivity: A clause preventing a creator working with competing brands for a set period. It restricts future earnings, so it must be paid for and tightly defined. Watch for vague category wording such as all beverages when the deal is about one energy drink.
Fan funding: Direct audience payments: tips, Super Chats, badges during lives, or platforms like Patreon and Ko-fi. Income is concentrated in a small share of the audience, so it rewards depth of relationship rather than size of following.
Gifted: A brand sending free product in exchange for coverage. If there is any agreement or control over what is posted, it is advertising and must be labelled #ad under ASA rules. Genuinely unconditional gifts still require clear disclosure of the incentive.
Influencer tiers: Rough size bands: nano under ten thousand followers, micro to around a hundred thousand, macro to around a million, mega above that. Smaller tiers usually show higher engagement and lower cost; larger tiers buy reach and awareness. Definitions vary between agencies.
Media kit: A short document a creator sends to brands: audience size and demographics, typical reach and engagement by format, past partnerships with results, and rates. Screenshots of analytics beat claimed numbers, and case studies with outcomes beat follower counts.
Monetisation: Turning audience into income. Platform routes such as advertising shares, tips and subscriptions have eligibility thresholds and pay modestly. Most sustainable creator income comes from brand work, affiliate sales or the creator's own products and services.
RPM (revenue per mille)YouTube: A creator's actual earnings per thousand views after the platform's share, across all revenue sources. Different from advertiser-facing CPM, which is what the brand paid before the platform took its cut. RPM is the number that matters to the creator.
Rate card: A creator's published pricing by deliverable, such as a Reel, a three-video package or a Story series. Good rate cards price usage rights, exclusivity and whitelisting separately, because those are what brands most often try to obtain for free.
Subscriptions: Recurring monthly payments for exclusive posts, community access or early releases. More predictable than one-off tips, but it creates a delivery obligation every month, so only promise what you can produce during a bad week.
UGC creator: Someone paid to produce authentic-looking content for a brand to publish on its own channels and ads, without posting it themselves. Their audience is irrelevant to the job; craft, turnaround and understanding the brief are what get them rebooked.
Usage rights: Permission for a brand to use creator content beyond the creator's own channels: in ads, on its website, in store or in email. Defined by media, territory and duration. Perpetual worldwide rights are expensive and should never be agreed by default.
YouTube Partner ProgrammeYouTube: YouTube's monetisation scheme, requiring a subscriber threshold plus either long-form watch hours or Shorts views within the qualifying period, and adherence to advertiser-friendly guidelines. Acceptance unlocks ad revenue, memberships, Super Thanks and shopping features.

Legal

#ad: The label UK rules expect on content a brand paid for or controlled. It must be upfront and clear before anyone engages, not buried in a hashtag block or after a more link. #ad is the safest wording; #sp or #collab are not sufficient.
ASA: The Advertising Standards Authority, the UK's advertising regulator. It investigates complaints, rules publicly on whether ads breach the codes, and can name offending brands and influencers on its website. It covers organic social posts, not just paid advertising.
Accessibility and WCAG: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the standard behind most accessibility obligations, currently version 2.2 at level AA for UK public sector bodies. In social terms it means captions, alt text, sufficient colour contrast, readable text size and avoiding meaning carried by colour alone.
CMA: The Competition and Markets Authority, which enforces UK consumer protection law. Unlike the ASA it has statutory teeth: hidden advertising, fake reviews and misleading endorsements can lead to formal enforcement and substantial fines rather than a published ruling.
Copyright: Automatic protection for original work from the moment it is created, with no registration needed. It applies to photos, video, music, text and designs, including posts by your own customers. Crediting someone is not permission, and neither is the content being public.
Defamation: Publishing an untrue statement that seriously harms someone's reputation. In England and Wales the claimant must show serious harm, and truth, honest opinion and public interest are defences. A post, a reply or a quote post can all be publication.
Fair dealing: The narrow UK exceptions allowing limited use of protected work without permission, covering quotation, criticism or review, news reporting, and parody, caricature or pastiche. There is no broad American-style fair use, so do not rely on that reasoning in the UK.
Financial promotions: Promoting investments, credit or crypto in the UK is restricted: the communication generally must be made or approved by an FCA-authorised firm and carry required risk warnings. The rules apply to creators too, and the FCA has prosecuted people over social media promotions.
Gifted product rules: Under ASA guidance, if a brand sends product and has any control or expectation over the resulting post, it is an ad and needs #ad. Where there is genuinely no agreement it may not be an ad, but consumer law still requires the gift to be disclosed clearly.
HFSS advertising rules: UK restrictions on advertising less healthy food and drink, high in fat, salt or sugar. Paid online advertising for identifiable HFSS products is prohibited, with a brand-only advertising exemption. It affects paid influencer content as well as media buying.
ICO: The Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's data protection regulator. It publishes practical guidance for small organisations, handles complaints about misuse of personal data, and can issue enforcement notices and fines. Its direct marketing guidance is the reference point for social competitions.
Lawful basis: The legal justification required before processing personal data, chosen from six options such as consent, contract or legitimate interests. You must identify it before you start and record it. Legitimate interests requires a documented balancing assessment, not just an assertion.
Material connection: Any relationship that might affect how an endorsement is read: payment, free product, commission, employment, equity or a family tie. If one exists it must be disclosed, regardless of whether the opinion given is genuine and unprompted.
Music licensing: Platform music libraries are licensed for personal use only. Business and brand accounts must use the commercial sound collections, such as Meta Sound Collection or TikTok's Commercial Music Library, or licence tracks directly. Using a chart hit on a brand post risks muting and takedown.
Online Safety Act 2023: UK legislation regulated by Ofcom, placing duties on platforms to tackle illegal content and protect children, with age assurance requirements for some services. For social teams the practical effects are stricter moderation, age-gating of certain content, and more aggressive automated enforcement.
Permission to film: Before publishing recognisable people, get their agreement in writing, however informal. Filming children requires consent from a parent or guardian. Many venues also restrict commercial filming, so ask the site as well as the individuals appearing in the shot.
Prize draw vs skill competition: A free prize draw decided by chance is lawful; charging for entry into a chance-based draw becomes an illegal lottery under the Gambling Act 2005. Adding a genuine skill element, or a free entry route, keeps it legal. Publish full terms either way.
Regulated claims: Statements that trigger extra rules, such as health and nutrition claims, medical or cosmetic results, environmental or green claims, and price comparisons. They must be substantiated before publication, and the brand remains responsible even when a creator wrote the words.
UK GDPR: The UK's data protection regime, sitting alongside the Data Protection Act 2018 and regulated by the ICO. It governs everything from customer lists uploaded to ad platforms to competition entries and DM enquiries, and it requires a documented reason for each use.

Metrics

Attribution: Deciding which touchpoints get credit for a conversion. Every model is a simplification: last-click undervalues awareness, platform-reported figures overvalue the platform reporting them. Pick one model, use it consistently, and expect the numbers never to reconcile exactly.
Average view duration: Mean seconds watched per view. Read it alongside video length as a percentage: sixty seconds of a ninety-second video is excellent, sixty seconds of a twenty-minute video is not. It reflects the whole audience, including those who left instantly.
Bounce rate: The share of visitors who land on a page and leave without a further interaction. High bounce from social is normal and not always bad: someone who read your whole article and left satisfied still counts as a bounce in older analytics setups.
CPA (cost per acquisition): Spend divided by the number of completed actions such as purchases or leads. The main efficiency number for performance campaigns. Compare it to what a customer is actually worth to you, not to an industry benchmark from a different business.
CPC (cost per click): Spend divided by clicks. Useful for comparing creatives, but a cheap click that never converts is worse than an expensive one that does, so never optimise a campaign to CPC when the goal is sales or leads.
CPM (cost per mille): The cost of a thousand impressions. A market price, not a performance measure: it rises with competition, audience narrowness and seasonality, and spikes in the UK before Christmas and around Black Friday. Rising CPM with steady results is not a failure.
CTR (click-through rate): Clicks divided by impressions, as a percentage. Check whether a platform is reporting all clicks, which includes expanding the caption, or link clicks only. Outbound link CTR on social is usually well under two percent, so judge it against your own history.
Completion rate: The share of viewers who watched to the end. Heavily weighted on short-form platforms, which is why a tight fifteen-second video often out-reaches a rambling forty-five-second one. Loops and replays can push it above one hundred percent.
Conversion: A visitor completing the action you defined: a purchase, enquiry, booking or sign-up. The definition is yours to set, so write it down. Counting newsletter sign-ups and sales together in one conversion number makes a campaign impossible to judge.
Dwell time: How long someone stays with a post before scrolling on, including reading a caption or expanding a carousel. Not usually shown in dashboards but strongly inferred by ranking systems, which is why long captions and multi-slide posts can lift reach.
ERR (engagement rate by reach): Engagements divided by reach. The fairest of the common formulas because it measures reaction among people who actually saw the post, rather than among followers who may never have been served it. Use it as your default and label it clearly.
Engagement rate: Engagements divided by an audience figure, as a percentage. The denominator is not standardised, so the same post can show wildly different rates. Always state which one you used: followers, reach or impressions. Comparing rates from different denominators is meaningless.
Follower growth rate: New followers in a period divided by the starting count, as a percentage. More honest than raw follower gain because it scales: a hundred new followers is remarkable on a thousand-follower account and invisible on a hundred thousand.
Incrementality: The sales an activity genuinely caused, over and above what would have happened anyway. Measured with holdout tests or geographic splits rather than platform dashboards. Frequently far lower than reported attribution, particularly for retargeting warm audiences.
ROAS (return on ad spend): Revenue attributed to ads divided by ad spend, expressed as a multiple. Platform-reported ROAS is usually optimistic because platforms claim credit for sales that would have happened anyway. Sanity check against total business revenue over the same period.
Retention curve: The graph showing what percentage of viewers are still watching at each second. The steep drop in the first three seconds is normal; look for the second, unexpected dip and fix whatever happens there. Flat sections mean the content is working.
Save rate: Saves divided by reach. One of the most useful signals available: saving means the content is worth returning to, and it is weighted heavily on Instagram and Pinterest. Educational and reference formats reliably out-save entertainment.
Sends per reachInstagram: How often people shared your post into DMs, divided by reach. Instagram has named this publicly as a metric it values, because sending something to a friend is the strongest evidence a post was worth someone's social capital.
Sentiment: Whether mentions of your brand are positive, negative or neutral. Automated scoring struggles with sarcasm, British understatement and industry jargon, so treat tool-generated sentiment as a prompt to read the actual posts rather than a number to report.
Share of voice: Your brand's proportion of the conversation in your category, measured as mentions relative to named competitors over a period. Useful directionally for awareness reporting, but sensitive to how you define the category and which competitors you include.
UTM parameters: Tags added to a URL, such as utm_source and utm_medium, that tell your analytics where a visitor came from. Agree a naming convention and stick to it; inconsistent capitalisation alone will split one campaign into four rows in your reports.
Video view: Counted differently on every platform, so never compare across them. TikTok counts a view the moment the video starts, Instagram now counts plays similarly, and YouTube requires around thirty seconds. The same video can honestly show wildly different view counts.
Watch time: Total time people spent watching your video, usually in hours. The most important YouTube metric because the system optimises for session length rather than views. A ten-minute video watched halfway beats a one-minute video watched fully.

Technical

API: The official interface letting other software read from or post to a platform. Scheduling tools, analytics dashboards and inbox tools all depend on one. API restrictions explain why a tool cannot do something the app can, such as publishing certain formats.
Cross-posting: Publishing the same content to multiple platforms, often automatically. Efficient but visibly lazy when it leaves foreign watermarks, wrong aspect ratios or platform-specific wording in place. Adapt the framing and the caption even when the footage is identical.
Deep link: A URL that opens a specific screen inside an app rather than a website or the app's home screen, for example a product page in your shopping app. Reduces drop-off from ads and bios on mobile, where most social traffic is.
Embed: Placing a live social post inside a web page using platform-provided code, so it keeps its formatting and stays linked to the original. Preferable to a screenshot for attribution and accuracy, though it disappears if the original is deleted.
Geotag: Location data attached to a post. Adds local discoverability and is valuable for venues and local businesses. Consider safety before tagging a home, a school or a live location, especially on personal accounts and for accounts run by young people.
Metadata: Information about a file or post rather than its visible content: titles, descriptions, tags, capture location, timestamps and file details. Platforms read it to classify content, and it can also leak information you did not mean to publish.
Native posting: Publishing directly in the platform's own app rather than through a third-party tool. Gives access to the newest features, stickers, effects and sounds first. Claims that scheduled posts are penalised are not supported by evidence; feature gaps are the real cost.
OG tags (Open Graph): HTML tags controlling how a page looks when shared: the title, description and preview image. Missing or wrong OG tags produce blank or ugly link previews that suppress clicks. Fix them once and every future share benefits.
Pixel firing: The moment tracking code actually sends an event, such as a page view or purchase. Debug with the platform's testing tool: events that fire twice inflate conversions, and events that never fire make a profitable campaign look like a failure.
Scheduling tool: Software such as Later, Buffer, Hootsuite or Metricool that queues posts to publish automatically. Saves significant time, but check which formats publish directly and which only send a reminder, because reminder-based posting still needs someone present.
Two-factor authentication (2FA): A second login step, ideally an authenticator app rather than SMS, which is vulnerable to SIM swapping. Non-negotiable on any business account. Most brand account takeovers begin with a phishing DM about copyright or a fake brand deal.
Webhook: An automatic message one system sends another when something happens, such as a new comment or a completed order. The plumbing behind most automations, letting tools react instantly instead of checking repeatedly for changes.

UK regulation

Advertorial: Content in an editorial format that a marketer has paid for. CAP rule 2.4 requires it to be headed as an advertisement feature — the format itself is what creates the risk of confusion.
Banned practice: One of the 32 commercial practices in Schedule 20 of the DMCC Act that are unfair in all circumstances. No need to show any consumer was actually misled — hidden advertising is number 12.
CAP Code: The UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising and Direct & Promotional Marketing, written by the Committee of Advertising Practice and enforced by the ASA. It covers a brand's own social channels, not just paid media.
Concealed incentivised review: A review reflecting genuine experience but obtained in exchange for an incentive that is not disclosed. Incentivised reviews are lawful; concealing the incentive is a banned practice.
Control test: The second limb of the ASA's remit over influencer content: the brand must have some editorial control, which includes merely reserving the right to approve a post before it goes up.
DMCC Act 2024: The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Its consumer protection regime replaced the 2008 CPUT Regulations from 6 April 2025 and gave the CMA power to fine directly, up to 10% of global turnover.
Financial promotion: An invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity, communicated in the course of business. Communicating one without authorisation or approval is a criminal offence under section 21 of FSMA.
Finfluencer: The FCA's term for someone not authorised to give financial advice who shares opinions and recommendations about money on social platforms. They can be personally criminally liable.
Identifiable less healthy product: A high fat, salt or sugar product that UK consumers could reasonably be expected to identify from an advertisement. Paid online placement of these has been restricted since 5 January 2026.
Individual subscriber: PECR's term for a person — including sole traders and most partnerships — who gets the consent protection for marketing messages. Incorporated bodies are corporate subscribers and do not.
Joint controller: Where two organisations jointly decide the purposes and means of processing personal data. The ICO's view is that an advertiser and a platform are likely joint controllers for custom audience tools.
Limited functionality service: The Online Safety Act exemption for services where users can only comment or review on the provider's own content, like, react, vote or rate. It is why a website comment section is out of scope.
Non-compliant influencers list: The ASA's public list of influencers who would not give, or reneged on, an assurance to disclose ads. Listing comes with enhanced monitoring and ads run against them on their own platform.
Obviously identifiable: The CAP rule 2.1 standard: a consumer must be able to tell content is advertising without effort, and before engaging with it. A label revealed only after tapping “more” fails the test.
PECR: The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003. Sits alongside the UK GDPR and governs marketing email, SMS, social DMs, cookies and tracking pixels.
Soft opt-in: The PECR exception allowing marketing messages to someone whose details you obtained during a sale or sale negotiation, for similar products, with an opt-out every time. A free download is not a sale negotiation.
Standalone compliance: The FCA requirement that each financial promotion complies on its own. A post cannot borrow its risk warning from a linked page, a pinned comment or a profile bio.
Storage and access technologies: The ICO's umbrella term, replacing “cookies”, for cookies, tracking pixels, link decoration, device fingerprinting and web storage. All are caught by the same consent rules.
Strong appeal: The gambling advertising test: content that unduly attracts under-18s regardless of how much it also appeals to adults. Stricter than the “particular appeal” test it replaced.
User-to-user service: An internet service where content uploaded by one user may be encountered by others. The Online Safety Act's duties fall on whoever controls access to it — usually the platform, not a brand page on it.

You know the words. Now learn the craft.

The free placement assessment builds you a personalised path through all 28 modules — from the basics to running social at a professional level.

Take the free assessment