Expressions for Social Media

Lesson Transcript

Hi, everybody! My name is Alisha.

In this lesson, I’m going to talk about expressions for social media.

Let’s get started!

All right! I wanna talk about a lot of verbs that we use, specifically for social media. So, it’s not for emails, it’s not for, like, communication in your office. It’s specifically for social media.

The first verb is “to post, to post.

This means to share something on social media. We can use it on Twitter or Facebook, Instagram. Whatever your preferred social media is, it means to share something there. We tend to use “to post” more on Instagram and on Facebook. We use maybe another verb, I’ll talk about later for Twitter, but you can use it on Twitter as well.

For example:

“I posted a picture on Instagram.”

So, “post” in the past tense becomes “posted.”

“I posted a picture on Instagram.”

Or, “I posted a picture on Facebook.”

“I posted a picture on Twitter.”

You can use it to talk about sharing something on social media; “to post,” to post.

Then, this next kind of group, I guess, is important for building your network on social media. So, we have these two verbs, “to friend” and “to follow (someone)” that we use most of the time. So, when we add someone to our social media accounts, we make a connection with someone, we friend them.

So, we use “friend” on Facebook. So, “Please friend me on Facebook.”

We use “follow” more on Twitter and Instagram, and we can also use “follow” on, like, Facebook pages too. There’s an option to follow or like to friend people, I think, as well. So, following and friending have really the same meaning, like you want to receive updates from that person, you want to exchange contact information with that person.

For example:

“I just followed you.”

So you could use it on Twitter or Instagram, whatever, “to friend” or “to follow.” I feel, more generally, we use “follow” to mean now, I’m receiving your updates.

Okay. Then the opposite of this is “to unfriend” or “to unfollow.”

You may also here “defriend,” but we do not use “defollow,” we use “unfollow.” So, “unfriend” or “unfollow,” that means to stop receiving updates from someone. So, maybe, you were tired of the information or you don’t have a connection anymore, whatever. You unfriend someone on Facebook, which means you remove them from your friend list and you unfollow someone like on Twitter or on Instagram, to stop receiving their updates and you no longer appear in their list of connections.

So, an example sentence:

“My friend unfollowed me.”

So, “unfollowing” people can kind of be something that makes relationships a little bit complicated, friendships or even, like, relationships in your family or like romantic relationships.

So, friending and unfriending, following and unfollowing can be kind of an interesting part of using social media. So, we use “unfollow” in the past tense as “unfollow.”

Okay, let’s go to the next one,”to mute.”

This verb, “to mute” is interesting because you use “mute” when you want to stop seeing someone’s information, like you want to stop seeing tweets or you want to stop seeing Instagram posts from someone, but you do not want “to unfollow” that person.

So maybe, for example, someone has a big event coming up and they’re sharing lots and lots of promotional information about their event on their like Instagram account or their Twitter account and you feel like, so, so tired of seeing the same information about that, you might mute that person. So that means you just turn off their updates, but you’re still following that person. So, you can unmute. The opposite of this is “unmute,” just as with “unfriend” and “unfollow.”

So, “to mute” someone means just to turn off their updates without unfollowing them and to unmute means to enable seeing their information again. So, you never unfollowed the person. You just choose to stop seeing their updates and you don’t want to, like, cause any problems, maybe, in your relationships.

So, “mute” can be a good way too, like, save a relationship online, a social media relationship online with someone who posts a lot or maybe they just share a lot of things that you’re not interested in, but you want to be their friend or their co-worker or whatever.

So, this is “to mute” and the opposite, “to unmute.”

For example:

“I had to mute my co-worker. His posts were annoying.”

So maybe you know someone like that. They post a lot of stuff that’s not very interesting for you, you might choose to mute that person.

Okay, the next verb here is “to block,” to block.

So, we use “block” to stop someone from seeing our updates. So, if there’s a strange person that tries to follow you or maybe you have a really bad relationship with someone or maybe you have a breakup and you decide you don’t want that person to see your information, you can choose “to block a person,” to a block a person, past tense “blocked.”

So, “I blocked a strange account that was sending me pictures.”

So, a strange account was sending me lots of pictures. They were, like, really not good pictures. They were not what I want to see and I don’t know the person, so I blocked the account. They can’t send me information anymore and they can’t see my updates either. So, this is “to block” someone.

Okay, the next one, this is very interesting, because this is actually a symbol, “to @” is how we read this, “to @.” So, “to @(someone)” means to include their username in a comment or in a post or something, you’re essentially notifying that person, first, you’re notifying that person that you’re making some comment about them or you’re including them in a post of some kind, and other people who see that post can click on the link, can click on the username to find that person’s profile.

So, for example, if your username is like “abc,” it would look look “@” mark “abc” and when you @(someone), like if I want to @abc, I would include it in my Instagram post or whatever and then I can see– and then “abc,” person abc can receive the information that I am sharing about them and other people can be linked to abc. So, this is called “to @(someone),” to include their username in a comment or to reply to that person with their username.

So, you will often see this expression right here, “don’t @me,” don’t @me. So, people often use this when they share a very strong opinion about something, like “Pepperoni pizza is the best pizza, don’t @me.” So that means I don’t want to hear your responses, so that means don’t put my username in a reply to this. Don’t reply to me with your opinions because this is my opinion and I have a strong opinion about it.

So, we often use this in a joking way, but sometimes, you’ll hear it in a more serious way too. Most of the time, I feel like we’re kind of joking or teasing about something. So, this is what “@” means, when we read the symbol as “at.”

Okay. Let’s go on to the next group then. The next group is “to tag” or “to untag” (someone).

To tag or or untag (someone) is used a lot in photos. So, on Instagram, if we share a photo and there are people in the photo, we can select the people and add their username. We can “@” the person in the photo. So, when we click on the photo, we can see all of the people or all of the accounts that are tagged in the photo. So, “to tag (someone)” means to mark someone in a photo or in a post. You can tag someone in a post.

The opposite is “to untag.” That means to remove a tag from a photo.

So, in an example sentence:

“Don’t tag me in a photo.”

So maybe, there’s an embarrassing photo of you or for some reason, you don’t want to be included in the information of the photo, you can say, “Don’t tag me in the photo” or “I untagged (in past tense), “I untagged myself from the photo.” So, “to tag” is to include yourself in a post or in a photo of something or to include another person and “to untag” means to remove yourself.

So, what’s the difference between “tag” and “@”?

“To @” is a written message. “To @(someone)” is a written message. And “to tag (someone)” is like just to include someone in the post or to note that someone appeared in a photo somewhere. So “to @(someone)” is like to include some kind of written comment.

Okay, the next one is “to report,” to report. So, when you see something strange, suspicious or there’s, like, harassment or something inappropriate, you can report a post. I’ve just used pose as a noun. “Post” is anything that’s on the internet. Any like one update on social media is a post.

So, you can report a post for some reason. So, that means you want to share with the administrators that there’s some kind of problem with this post.

For example:

“I reported an account for spam.”

In this case, it’s an account, not just a post, but one user’s account is sharing lots of spam. So, “spam” means lots and lots of junk information or they’re sending lots of, maybe, advertisements I didn’t request. This is spam, this is junk, so I reported (past tense), reported the account for spam.

You’ll notice, we use “for” here, plus a noun phrase.

“I reported an account for spam.”

So, this shows us the reason we reported.

All right. So, this leads us to the next vocabulary word, which is “to spam,” to spam.”

So, “spam” can be used as a noun, yes, to mean junk and we can use spam as a verb. When we use “spam” as a verb, it means we share a lot of information, like, at one time. Maybe in 15 minutes, we make lots of posts about the same topic or we share lots of tweets about the same thing. We’re spamming someone’s timeline. So, the “timeline” is that row of updates that you see when you’re into Facebook or Instagram or Twitter. All of the updates that you can look at, that’s called the timeline.

So, to spam someone’s timeline means just to share a lot of stuff at the same time. So, it’s a negative thing, generally.

For example:

“That guy always spams my timeline with junk.”

Maybe you know somebody who looks like, promotes a lot of things or maybe there’s a brand you follow that has this specific promotion style. They share a lot of information. So, you can call that spamming, spamming.

Okay, the next verb is “to repost.”

“To repost” is how we say this, not repost but “repost,” to repost. “To repost” means to post again, to post again. So, this is sharing something again that you shared in the past. So, this is different from “retweet,” I’ll talk about in a minute. “To repost” means to share something again. So, maybe, on Instagram, you have a favorite photo or a photo you shared a few years ago and you want to share that photo again, you can say, “I’m reposting this photo” or “I reposted this thing.”

Another example:

“I might repost the information about my event.”

So, I might share this thing that I shared before. I might repost something.

Okay, the next two verbs are specifically for Twitter. So, they are “to tweet” and “to retweet.”

So, “to tweet” means to share an update on Twitter, to write something on Twitter or to include in your post a picture or a link, whatever. Anything you write on Twitter is a tweet, one, as a noun and we also describe the act of using Twitter, like to share information as tweeting, so “I’m tweeting.” That means I’m sharing something on my Twitter account.

For example:

“You tweet too much.”

So that means you share too much information on Twitter.

“You tweet too much.”

So, too much in terms of frequency.

“You tweet too much.”

Then to “retweet” or “to quote tweet” means to share someone else’s tweet or you can share your own tweet again. So, it’s kind of like reposting, sort of, but generally when we say repost, we mean creating another post with the same information you had before. With “retweet,” it’s like we’re just- we’re refreshing, kind of. We see something that someone else wrote that we like and we want to share, we can retweet that information and it shares on our timeline to the people who follow us. But that’s not quite “reposting.” Reposting is taking some content from the past or from another person’s post and making a new post with that thing. So, “retweeting” is like sharing on Twitter, really.

You might also see “quote tweet” or “QT.” So, “to quote tweet” means to find the tweet you like or to find the tweet you want to share and quote it inside your tweet. So, we can see the original text, maybe the original thing that someone else shared or maybe that you shared and you want to quote that and add an extra comment, maybe add a link. So we call that a “quote tweet,” or as a verb, we can say “to quote tweet (someone).”

For example:

“Thanks for retweeting me.”

Okay. This next one is “to like,” to like.

So, I think every social media platform now has the “like” function. On Facebook, it’s a thumbs up or we can choose many different reactions now on Facebook. On Twitter, they are hearts. It used to be called “favorites” on Twitter. On Instagram, it’s “likes” also or maybe just a heart symbol too, but we use “like,” to like (something), to like (something).

And of course, if you want to remove a like, you can say, “to unlike (something),” to unlike (something). But generally, when we like something, it stays there, I think.

So, “to like (something)” just means to mark that you like a post or you like a tweet, you like a picture in Instagram.

For example:

“She liked my post.”

Or “He liked my post.”

So, that’s a very general thing.

Okay. Let’s go to the next one, which is “to comment” or “to reply,” to comment or to reply. So, we can use either of these to talk about responses to someone’s post. So, this is a bit different from this one, “to @” because when we @(someone), we include their username in our comment or in our reply or whatever to, like, send them a notification about this.

So, not always is an @ like a comment or a reply. Sometimes, they are the same. Sometimes, they are different. If, for, example, you write a comment on my post, like I make a post about my favorite pizza and let’s say “don’t @me” or something and you comment or you reply directly to my post, that would be you’re “@-ing” me, yes, and you’re commenting or you’re replying.

But in cases where the poster is talking about someone else, for example, you might comment or you might reply to the original poster and you don’t want to mention the other person. So, you do not include their @, like you don’t include their handle. So, you’re not “@-ing” the other person, if that makes sense. You can comment and reply to the original poster and you don’t have to @ another person in the conversation. So, this is a case where comment and reply might not mean the same thing as “to @” someone.

So, “to comment” or “to reply” to something is to reply to a post, to comment on a post. So, those are the two prepositions we use to comment on a post, to reply to a post or to reply to someone. So, “reply to,” “comment on,” those are the prepositions we use.

For example:

“I get so many useless comments on my post.”

So, you can use “comment” more, I feel like on Facebook or on Instagram and we use “reply” a lot on Twitter. But you may hear “reply” used on Instagram from time to time.

Okay, the next verb is “to edit.”

“To edit (something)” means to change something. We do not have an edit feature on Twitter at the time of making this video anyway, but we do have an edit feature on Instagram and on Facebook. So, “to edit” means to make a change to your post. If you find, like a mistake or if you realize you need to share some more information or remove some information, you can edit your post. You can edit like the text in your post or to remove a photo or include a photo or something.

For example:

“I need to edit that post.”

So, you found a mistake or you’re missing information, so “to edit (something).”

Okay, the next one is an important word for social media in general. This mark is read as “hashtag,” hashtag. So, “hashtags” are used to make categories for your post. Hashtags are used a lot on Instagram. So, for example, if I make a post on my Instagram about this lesson, I might write #englishclass101. So, that means everything that’s- every post rather, every post that has this #englishclass101 is somehow connected to our lessons and our content or maybe our YouTube channel or our website.

So, everything with that hashtag has some relationship to this topic, englishclass101. Or if I wanna talk about my favorite movie, I could write #(my favorite movie) or #(the name of the movie I just saw) like The Lion King.

So, hashtags are used so that we can search for other posts that have the same topic. You might also see a hashtag like this used. So “tbt,” this is a very popular hashtag. “Tbt” stands for “throwback Thursday.” This is an example of a common, like social media trend. So, maybe, every day of the week, there is a different trend you can participate in on social media. Tbt or throwback Thursday is a very popular one. So, as you can guess, this happens on Thursday and “throwback” means we’re looking back. So, “to throwback” is a casual way to mean to look back, like, in a happy way on something from the past. So, we share a post from the past on Thursday and tag it “tbt”. So, I’ve just used “tag” here. To tag (something) with a hashtag, we could do this as well. So you can tag it “tbt” or “#tbt.”

So, this is how we use hashtags and we use the word hashtag to express this mark.

Okay, the next verb is “to scroll.”

“To scroll” refers to this motion. So, as you look on your phone or on your computer or your tablet, whatever, this motion, if you’re on your phone or a tablet, a touch device is scrolling. If you use a mouse, you just move the mouse, roll the mouse ball down the screen, whatever.

So, this motion, moving the information from the top of the screen to the bottom is called “to scroll,” to scroll.

So, “I scrolled Twitter for hours yesterday.”

So, past tense, “scrolled.”

“I scrolled Twitter for hours yesterday” or “I scrolled Instagram for 3 hours yesterday.”

So, that means just looking at the information on your timeline.

Okay, the next keyword is “emoji,” emoji.

So, “emoji” are those little faces or like the little characters, the little pictures that we can use in text messages and in the text in our posts on social media. These are called emoji in English.

For example:

“I don’t like using emoji.”

So, some people really like them, some people don’t like to use them so much. It’s up to you. Emoji is the word we use to talk about those.

Okay, the last word for this lesson is recent slang and this is specific for Twitter. It is “to get ratioed,” to get ratioed. “To get ratioed” means to receive a huge number of replies to a post, but the ratio or the number of replies is much, much larger than the people who shared it or the people who like the post.

So, for example, this user, we might say about this user:

“That guy got ratioed.”

So, this post, this is the user, maybe the username is “weirdopinion,” for example. Anyway, the post is “food is bad,” food is bad. So, this is a very unpopular opinion or maybe a bad opinion. So, the number of replies in this example is 1322, a lot of replies. The number of retweets, so times people shared the tweet, 16, and 29 likes on the post. So, in this example, there are so many replies here, but there are so few people who wanted to share or who maybe like or agree with this post. We call this a ratio. So, on Twitter, it’s like a Twitter slang, “to get ratioed.”

“That guy got ratioed.”

So, lots of people replied to say that this was not a good opinion. So, this is a unique expression that we use on Twitter. We do not use this on Instagram or on Facebook, but you may see this on Twitter from time to time.

So, those are some expressions that you can use for social media. Thanks very much for watching this lesson and I will see you again soon. Bye-bye!

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