This month is the final installment of the glossary series that has included Content Marketing Glossary and Web Marketing Glossary.  This month I demystify some of the current tools and technologies that are out there to help you promote and engage your customers and prospects via social media.  If your target audience involves prospects under 30 and particularly younger women then social media tools and channels are vital to your business.

What is Digg?

Digg is a popular social news site that lets people discover and share content from anywhere on the Web. Users submit links and stories and the community votes them up or down and comments on them. Users can “digg” stories they like or “bury” others they don’t.

What is Facebook?

Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world, with more than 200 million members. Members’ home page streams can now be seen in a wide range of applications and devices.

What is Flickr?

Founded by two entrepreneurs and purchased by Yahoo! in 2005, Flickr is the world’s premier photo sharing and hosting site. Its members have uploaded more than 3 billion photos

What is geotagging?

Geotagging is the process of adding location-based metadata to media such as photos, video or online maps. Geotagging can help users find a wide variety of businesses and services based on location.

What is a hashtag?

A hashtag (or hash tag) is a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. Similar to tags on Flickr, you add them in-line to your Twitter posts by prefixing a word with a hash symbol (or number sign). Twitter users often use a hashtag like #followfriday to aggregate, organize and discover relevant posts.

What is Marketing Grader

MarketGrader.com is a tool developed by Hubspot to provide a quick check on the effectiveness of your online marketing presence.  Allows companies to input their URL and those of the their competitors and see where they stack up and gives a report on how they can improve.

What is microblogging?

Microblogging is the act of broadcasting short messages to other subscribers of a Web service. On Twitter, entries are limited to 140 characters, and applications like Plurk and Jaiku take a similar approach with sharing bite-size media. Probably a more apt term for this activity is “microsharing.”

What is OpenID?

OpenID is a single sign-on system that allows Internet users to log on to many different sites using a single digital identity, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site.

What is a tweet?

A post on Twitter, a real-time social messaging system. While all agree on usage of tweet as a noun, people disagree on whether you “tweet” or “twitter” as a verb. RT stands for retweet: Users add RT in a tweet if they are reposting something from another person’s tweet.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a popular social network, unveiled to the public in July 2006, that lets members post updates of no more than 140 characters. People have begun using Twitter in interesting ways to point to news stories, to raise funds for charity, and other unexpected uses.

What is Web conferencing?

Web conferencing is used to conduct live meetings or presentations over the Internet. In a web conference, each participant sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the Internet. This can be either a downloaded application on each of the attendees computers or a web-based application where the attendees will simply enter a URL (website address) to enter the conference.

What is a widget?

A widget, sometimes called a gadget, badge or applet, is a small block of content, typically displayed in a small box, with a specific purpose, such as providing weather forecasts or news, that is constantly updating itself (typically via RSS). Widgets make it easy to add dynamic content to your site or blog.

What is a wiki?

A wiki is a collaborative website that can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. Small teams often find that they can accomplish a task easier by creating a collaborative online workspace using wiki software such as pbworks, Socialtext or mediawiki.

What is YouTube?

YouTube is the world’s most popular video hosting site, making up 10 percent of all bits that travel across the entire Internet.

About the Author: Heather Rubesch is currently the Director of Content for DemandCon, the only industry conference focused on accelerating the entire sales and marketing funnel. Her penchant for collaboration drew her 3 years ago to co-found the Savvy B2B Marketing blog with five of the most talented content marketers in the universe!