The Social Media Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the terms creators, marketers and devs run into every day when scheduling posts, running campaigns and reading analytics.
AI captions
Captions generated by an AI model from a brief, image, or topic, then refined by a human before scheduling.
Algorithm (social media)
The set of rules a network uses to decide which posts each user sees, in what order, and how often.
Alt text
A short text description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and used by search engines to understand what the image shows.
Approval workflow
A review process where one or more people must approve a post before it gets scheduled or published.
Auto-publishing
A scheduler that connects to social network APIs and publishes posts automatically at the time you set, without you needing to be online.
Best time to post
The hours and days when an audience is most likely to see and engage with new posts on a specific network.
Brand kit
A central collection of a brand's visual and verbal assets — logos, colors, fonts, tone-of-voice rules, banned words — that keeps every post consistent.
Caption
The text portion of a social media post — the words that accompany an image, video, or link.
Carousel post
A post made of multiple slides — images or videos — that the viewer swipes through. Common on Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
Click-through rate (CTR)
The percentage of viewers who clicked a link in your post — measured as link clicks divided by impressions or reach.
Content calendar
A visual planner that lays out which posts go to which networks on which days, so a team can see the whole month at a glance.
Content pillar
A recurring theme or topic that a brand publishes about consistently — the structural columns that hold up the content strategy.
Engagement rate
A metric that measures how much your audience interacts with a post relative to its reach or follower count — a quick proxy for content quality.
Evergreen content
Posts that stay relevant indefinitely and can be re-shared multiple times without losing value.
Hashtag
A keyword prefixed with # used on social networks to categorize content and make it discoverable in search and topic feeds.
Impressions
The total number of times a post was displayed, including repeat views by the same user.
Link in bio
A single clickable URL placed in a profile's bio — the workaround for networks that don't allow links inside individual posts.
MCP server
A server that exposes a product's API as standardized tools, so AI clients like Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor can call those tools on the user's behalf.
OAuth
A standard protocol that lets one app act on your behalf in another, without you sharing your password.
Posting queue
An ordered list of scheduled posts waiting to publish, organized by network and time slot.
Reach
The number of unique users who saw a post at least once.
Self-hosting
Running an open source application on your own servers instead of paying the maker to run it for you.
Shadowban
A reduction in a post or account's reach that the network applies silently, without notification, often after policy violations or aggressive automation.
User-generated content (UGC)
Posts, photos, videos, and reviews created by customers or community members rather than the brand itself.
Vanity metrics
Metrics that look impressive but don't connect to business outcomes — followers, total likes, post count.
Workspace
An isolated space inside TryPost that holds its own social accounts, calendar, members, and brand assets — used to keep clients or product lines separated.