a social media glossary.
reach, roas, ugc, cpm — decoded. the social media terms every business owner should know, in plain english.
you should never feel lost in a marketing meeting. here are the core social media terms, explained simply.
agencies and platforms throw around jargon that quietly excludes the people paying the bills. here is a plain-english glossary so you can read any report or pitch with confidence — no marketing degree required.
— 01reach, impressions and engagement.
reach is how many people saw it; impressions is how many times it was shown; engagement is reactions — likes, comments, saves, shares. saves and shares are the strongest signals.
reach is how many people saw something; impressions is how many times it was seen. one person seeing a post four times is a reach of one and four impressions, which is why the second number always looks better and means less.
engagement covers every interaction, which makes it nearly useless as a single figure. the ones worth separating are saves and shares — both indicate intent, while likes indicate almost nothing.
and hold rate is the one most owners have never been shown: what proportion of viewers were still watching at three seconds. it is the honest measure of whether a video was worth making.
— 02the paid terms.
roas is return on ad spend; cpm is cost per thousand impressions; cpc is cost per click; retargeting is ads to people who already engaged. these run every paid conversation.
cpa — cost per acquisition — is the number that matters, and roas is the revenue produced for each unit of ad spend. those two are what a paid campaign should actually be judged on.
and a conversion event is the action you have told the platform to optimise toward. set it to a purchase and it finds buyers; set it to a page view and it finds people who look at things.
— 03content and growth terms.
ugc is user-generated content; hook is the opening that stops the scroll; pillars are your recurring content themes; organic means unpaid. now no strategy meeting can lose you.
ugc is content made by customers or creators rather than by the brand, and it works because it does not look like advertising. it is a format, not a free source of labour.
a pillar is a category of content a brand commits to repeatedly, and a format is the repeatable shape a pillar takes. together they are what makes an account recognisable.
and organic versus paid is simply whether distribution was bought. the distinction matters because they answer on different timelines — paid in weeks, organic in quarters.
— 04the terms worth ignoring.
impressions as a headline, follower count unless you sell to advertisers, and any metric a supplier introduces that you have not heard before — the new term is often there because the familiar one looks bad.
the test is whether a number could change a decision. if a figure going up or down would not alter what you do next, it belongs in an appendix rather than a report.