You’re at your desk, cup of coffee in hand and you’re ready to start your day. You can’t wait! Soon, you’ll be representing your brand across the various social networks. The first order of business on your list today is to begin reading some of those great social media blogs that were suggested to you by your friends and followers. You open up your RSS reader, dive in, and suddenly realize within the first few paragraphs about CRM, sCRM, ROI and KPI that you’re overwhelmed by all these acronyms. What the heck do they mean and how can you focus on the point of the article if you have to keep stopping to look them up?

Keep It Simple Silly

It happens. Sometimes professionals forget that not everyone in their audience knows exactly what they know. This isn’t exclusive to social media either. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, every industry has their own terminologies and they can be quite confusing at times. Therefore, when setting out to share industry related knowledge across your social networks consider keeping it simple.

It doesn’t matter what social network you’re on or if you’re writing for the corporate blog, consider that on any given day your audience might range from someone who’s learning about your brand for the very first time to the industry insider who’s considered an influencer. You want to build a community based on your brand. Doing so means not only talking with others in your industry but perhaps educating consumers as well. If you want to use acronyms, instead of assuming that everyone knows what you’re talking about, explain exactly what each acronym means the first time you use it. The same goes for industry terminology too. Don’t get caught up in technical jargon. You don’t need it to present yourself as a thought leader and you may find yourself alienating part of your community if you don’t take the time to educate and inform when necessary.

Become A Resource

If you find yourself using acronyms and industry terms quite a bit, think about creating a glossary post on your corporate blog that can be used as a resource within your community. You can link back to it and reference it as needed. Plus, one of the best parts about creating it on your own site is that you’ll have the ability to update it as needed. You may even want to take it a step further and create a white paper that others can download and share.

About That Jargon

Because social media terminology is ever evolving, like social media itself, it would be quite an undertaking to try to list every single social media term. However, we did want to share a few of the popular social media acronyms and what they mean. Again, this isn’t a definitive list but rather a few of the more popular terms we thought you’d like to know:

• B2B: Business to business
• B2C: Business to consumer
• CGM: Consumer generated media
• CMS: Content management system
• CRM: Customer relationship management
• ERP: Enterprise resource planning
• KPI: Key performance indicators
• QR Code: Quick response code
• ROI: Return on investment
• SCRM: Social customer relationship management
• SEO: Search engine optimization
• SM: Social media
• SMM: Social media marketing
• UGC: User generated content

You can also check out Aaron Friedman’s Digital and Social Media Acronyms post at Digital Highrise for a more detailed list.

If your goal is to keep your community engaged, enchanted and educated about your brand why not make things as easy to understand as possible?

Do you find technical jargon, acronyms and industry terminology distracting when reading articles or trying to follow conversations? Are you using them yourself? What tips would you add? Please let us know in the comments below.