Social media marketing first started with publishing. Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured far beyond being just a place to broadcast content.

Nowadays, businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways. For example, a business that is concerned about what people are saying about its brand would monitor social media conversations and response to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement). A business that wants to understand how it’s performing on social media would analyze its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool (social media analytics). A business that wants to reach a specific set of audience at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads (social media advertising).

Even though you hear about the same few social networks all of the time, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any others out there.

Wikipedia alone lists over 200 of them.

This great graphic called “The Conversation Prism” gives a good overview.

While this list is fairly up to date, it may come as a surprise to you that it’s entirely different from the first version of this graphic from 2008.

All versions aggregate around 200 services, but from version to version (which they usually update every 2-3 years), the creators remove over 100 social media platforms and add another 100.

The world of social media is changing incredibly fast. So when you’re just starting out, start with the ones that have been around for years.

Betting on “the next big thing” can pay off if you’re right. But, if you’re just getting started on a social media strategy, you can’t afford to not have a Facebook page or a Twitter account since we’ve already seen how effective they are.

Let’s look at some key social media terms.

Content

Content is whatever you are posting. It can be a Facebook status update, a photo on Instagram, a tweet, something to pin on a board on Pinterest, and so on.

The graphic already showed you that content comes in many different forms and that you need to custom-tailor it to each platform. What’s even more important than content, though, is context.

Context

Gary Vaynerchuk said that if content is king, then context is god. You can have a great joke, but if you place it somewhere inside a 3,000-word blog post, very few people will see it. On Twitter, however, that same joke as a tweet might crush it.

And, the opposite is also true.  Packaging your entire blog post into one tweet is hardly possible, so try a good call to action with some relevant hashtags instead. And that brings us to hashtags.

Hashtags

By now, they’re a very common form that people use to add meta information on almost all social media channels. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest all use hashtags to let you describe the topic of your content or mark it as part of current trends.

They make your content easy for users to discover and therefore more likely that they’ll share it.

Shares

Shares are the currency of the social media world. Shares are all that matters on social media.

People will keep talking to you about impressions, click-through rates, and potential reach. But none of these tell you whether people actually pass on what you have to say.

When people engage and interact with your content, that’s good. But, when they share it, that is the time when you celebrate.

A great social media tool to measure shares and the overall impact of content is BuzzSumo:

The more shares, the more people love your content. It’s the best form of engagement that people can have with it.

Engagement

This is a general term that means that people interact with the content that you produce. It can be a like, a reaction, a comment, or a share. All of these are good, but the shares are where it’s at.

Now that we’ve covered some definitions, let’s take a look at some social media marketing trends.

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Social Media Marketing Trends

The social media world changes faster than any other online space.

And keeping up with it isn’t an easy task.

So here are a few trends you’ll want to keep in mind. Most likely, these trends will impact not just this year, but also the future years to come.

Here’s what they are.

As a whole, these are often also known as social media management.