5 Must-Know Facebook Terms For Every Social Media Analyst

Social media analysts can face unique communication challenges. Sometimes, social media borrows terms from traditional marketing and gives them a new meaning, while other times you have to deal with completely new terms. This means that every report is littered with words that people unfamiliar with social media need explained, time and time again. What does “engagement” mean? What is “boosting”? How should we be leveraging our “ART”? The exercise of having to elaborate each time can be laborious. 

We recognize that when everyone’s talking the same language, you can get more done in less time. With this is mind, we’ve rounded up 5 Facebook terms and given them simple definitions that can be shared easily with your team. 

1. Average Reply Time (ART) 

ART denotes the average amount of time between when a user first posts a question on a brand’s Facebook wall and when the brand actually replies for the first time. ART doesn’t take into account the resolution of a problem but does help a brand understand and plan its customer service resource allocation.

2. Response Rate

A brand’s response rate is calculated by examining the number of questions/comments being posted on a brand’s Facebook wall and then seeing how many replies those questions and mentions received. This is useful for determining social media customer service resource allocation.

3. Boosting

Facebook encourages brands to think of it as a mass media platform. Just as with mass media advertising, brands must pay Facebook for their post to reach the masses and this process is called Boosting.

4. Monthly Active Users / Daily Active Users

Usually abbreviated to MAU & DAU respectively, these terms inform a brand how many users a have used a Facebook app. The DAU fluctuates daily, while the MAU is a 30-day moving average of the number of Daily Active Users. Combined with relevant benchmarks, a brand can understand how effective a Facebook app investment has been.

5. Reach 

This is the number of people that have been exposed to a piece of brand content on their newsfeeds (however, this doesn’t mean the audience necessarily noticed or interacted with the content in a meaningful way). As Facebook has restricted the organic reach to fans, brands now need to pay to achieve significant reach for their content — although organic user sharing of content can drastically increase reach.

Like on Facebook, each social network has its own bundle of terms reflecting the plethora of information that they offer. If you found this article helpful in explaining Facebook terminology, and would like a guide to terms used in other social networks, download our latest ebook “29 Must-Know Terms For Every Social Media Analyst“. Apart from helpful definitions of terms, you will find tips on where to locate the data, and insights from some of the top pros in the game. 

Explaining your analytics reports just got so much easier!