What does this mean?

You can now listen to my articles :)

To atone for my two recent articles, which had very little to do with social media, I've decided to look at acronyms. I get asked what things are quite a lot.

Social Media

Social media is an umbrella term for a group of websites which allow people to communicate for free. These sites give companies the ability to speak to customers and drive business. Social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc) do not actually do anything. They supply blank digital spaces on which people and companies can talk.

Social media has revolutionised the way people consume media and the speed at which news is disseminated has seen some of the worlds best known brands crumble in its wake. Newsweek, printed globally for nearly 80 years, in 2012 announced it would print no more, instead choosing to operate online only. Locally, newspapers are getting thinner and thinner as advertisers realise that social media advertising can be measured/analysed and is a fair bit cheaper.

'Social media' moves very quickly as people find new ways for other people to do the same thing. Snapchat as one example seems to be popular due to its ability to superimpose a small dog nose onto a users' face for a selfie. People seem to like that particular feature. Companies, unsurprisingly, struggle to keep up.

Social media has given rise to the influencer; a person who is able share content with others en mass. There is nothing new to this phenomenon, they are simply celebrity/journalists/TV stations/Radio shows/athletes, and so on. People like the content they share and what they do so they have gained influence. It's quite simple to understand when you draw comparisons.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing is the process of promoting a website to search engines. This could be by using SEO, PPC, third party bloggers, paid listings, and anything else that would increase rankings (and therefore visibility) on the first page of Google (usually).

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is the process of promoting a website to search engines organically (not by using advertising). The first aspect of SEO is to use keywords within a website by writing tailored content and renaming things like pictures and pages. SEO considers the searches people make on the internet to find your service and uses that information to re-write your website. Put simply, if someone would search for 'social media training in Dubai' when looking for Cave Chalk, we need to make sure that exact term and those similar are well represented on pages and in blog articles.

Google is not fond of SEO and changes its software often to try to give users the most relevant results possible. After all, it wants you to keep coming back and clicking on its adverts - that's how it makes money. If the first few pages of Google are stuffed with websites that don't hold relevance to the subject you are searching for, but are just a mess of keywords and phrases, you aren't going to hang around.

The second element is off-site SEO. Historically this has involved creating back-links, which are links to your website on another website. Google is an indexing system. It looks at a website and which websites link into it. It then judges the importance of your website accordingly. If cavechalk.com had a link on the Wall Street Journal, for example, Google would think wow - this Cave Chalk website must be important, because the WSJ certainly is based on it's 1m daily visitors. What words does it have on it? Social media training in Dubai? Fine, the next time someone searches for that term we'll show Cave Chalk on the first page.

PPC

Pay Per Click advertising is online advertising. You upload an image and pay Google each time someone clicks it. PPM also exists and stands for Pay Per Mille (you pay per 1000 views whether people click or not), and PPL, which stands for Pay Per Lead.

Budgets for PPC can vary greatly depending on the words targeted. Insurance is the worlds most expensive as many people use that search term. If you manufacture and sell false teeth for ageing horses you're probably going to pay considerably less than the insurance firm in the next building.

Blogging

A blog is an online magazine. Bloggers are the writers and editors of these magazines. Of course, we're not talking about Newsweek, but the concept is the same. A writer will update a blog at a frequency they chose, much like I do here.

The success to blogging is to have a plan. People say this a lot, you've probably read an article about it. It's true. No successful paper magazine operates without an editorial calendar. Why would a digital one be any different? Don't be scared of the word blog. If your social media company suggests one it knows you need it to succeed. Where will your content come from otherwise?

Digital Marketing

Often confused with social media marketing, digital marketing is another umbrella term that covers everything mentioned. If it markets your company and it's digital, it's digital marketing.

If I've missed something you want to know about please leave a comment, I'm always happy to help out with things like this. Don't ask me to help you move house though, I really hate doing that.