TOP TEN Social Media ACTION Words

Are you taking ACTION?  Here are the TOP TEN Social Media ACTION Words defined

Social Media is about how we connect and interact with each other and with brands online.  Most of you are familiar with the social media Trifecta: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  There are many other tools to integrate into your social repertoire.  When digging into the social toolbox, you’ll run into a lot of new jargon that is important to understand.  Instead of covering the entire social media dictionary here, we instead focus in on the Top Ten Social Media Action Words: Defined alphabetically.

• Checking in on a location-based social networking Web site like Foursquare or Gowalla, users “check-in” at venues using a mobile Web site, text messaging, or a device-specific application… they’re then awarded points and sometimes “badges.”
• Commenting A comment is a response that is often provided as an answer of reaction to a blog post or message on a social network. Comments are a primary form of two-way communication on the social Web.
• Connecting is adding friends or colleagues or in some cases, new contacts on LinkedIn.  The quickest way to connect with new contacts is to solve a problem. ie: They are looking for a job and you have a contact. So seek to find out who they are and what they need……so you can be a solution.
• Friending on Facebook, users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.
• Liking A “Like” is an action that can be made by a Facebook user. Instead of writing a comment for a message or a status update, a Facebook user can click the “Like” button as a quick way to show approval and share the message.
• Retweeting is the act of sharing someone else’s tweet with your followers – spreading the word wider. To identify a retweet, the Twitter convention is to put RT at the start of the retweet and to include the Twitter username of the person you are retweeting like attributing a quote. In fact, it is a violation of Twitters terms of service to present others’ material as your own, so attribution is key.
• Social bookmarking A method for people to search, organize, store and share items (i.e. blog posts, online articles, pictures, etc.) of interest using the item’s URL. (Delicious, Digg, StumbledUpon, etc.)
• Status update A short, text-based entry telling your friends & colleagues something you deem worthwhile. Some people use it to share inspirational quotes, some use it to describe their daily actions, and some use it to share links and pictures. (used in many places: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Buzz…)
• Tagging Commonly used in blogs, site authors attach keyword descriptions (called tags) to identify images, video or text within their site as a category or topic which enhances SEO.
• URL Shortening Because of the 140 character limit of each tweet, it can be difficult to include full URLs in a message.  Luckily, there are many services that can take a long URL and give you a shorter one, usually under 20 characters, to use instead. (bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc.)  There are many other places and reasons to use URL shortening.

So that’s the quick list.  There are many more so please add your own here and we’ll continue to build this list.  I hope this helps you gain an understanding of some of the Social Media Action words and look forward to seeing some of yours added.