Updated September 2026
Social media vocabulary changes almost as fast as the trends themselves. If you run a Shopify store, you don't need to know every meme, but you do need to know the handful of terms that decide how people find and buy from you on social platforms, and what each one means for your store in practice.
Here's the short glossary, with what to actually do about each term on Shopify.
How social selling reaches your store
Almost every term below sits somewhere on one of two routes: the customer buys inside the social app, or they tap through to your store. Either way, the order ends up in the same place.
Selling on social platforms
Social commerce
Buying and selling directly inside social media apps, so people can discover, browse and buy without leaving the feed. On Shopify you do it through sales channels: Facebook & Instagram by Meta syncs your products to a catalog for Facebook Shop and Instagram Shopping, and TikTok Shop syncs them to TikTok so people can buy there while you fulfill from your Shopify admin. See our guide to the social commerce boom for where to start.
Product tags and shoppable posts
Tags on a photo or video that name a product and its price. Tap one and you see the product, with a route to buy. They only work once your catalog is synced through the sales channel, so keep titles, prices and images in Shopify accurate: the post shows whatever the catalog says.
Shoppable video
Short videos with products attached, such as TikTok's in-feed videos, where viewers can buy directly from the video. Treat the first two seconds as the product photo: show the thing, in use, straight away.
Live shopping
A live stream where the host shows products and viewers buy during the broadcast. TikTok Shop supports selling during TikTok live broadcasts. It works best as a scheduled event with a reason to tune in: a launch, a demo, or an offer that only runs during the stream.
People and content
UGC (user-generated content)
Photos, videos and reviews made by customers rather than by you. It's the most believable form of social proof because it isn't an ad. Ask for it in your post-purchase emails, ask permission before you reuse it, and put the best of it on product pages, not just your feed.
Micro-influencers and creators
Creators with smaller, closely engaged audiences in a particular niche. For most independent stores they're a better fit than big-name influencers: easier to reach, more affordable, and closer to your actual customers. Pick people whose audience would genuinely use your product.
Affiliate links
A trackable link or discount code that pays a creator a commission on the sales they drive. Shopify's own Shopify Collabs app lets you recruit creators and create and track their affiliate links and codes, with commissions paid through your Shopify bill.
Social proof
Anything that shows other people buy and like what you sell: reviews, UGC, "bought recently" notices, follower counts. On your own store, reviews and recent-activity notices do this job. We wrote about turning recently viewed products into social proof.
Getting found
The algorithm and the For You feed
Platforms decide who sees a post based on how people react to it, not only on who follows you. Saves, shares, comments and watch time matter more than likes. Practically: post consistently, make content people want to send to a friend, and don't judge a format on one post.
Engagement rate
Interactions (likes, comments, shares, saves) divided by how many people saw the post or follow the account. It's a better health check than follower count, and the number to ask any creator for before you work with them.
Visual search
Searching with a picture instead of words, using tools like Google Lens or Pinterest Lens. You can't control it directly, but clear product photos on plain backgrounds, descriptive alt text and accurate product titles all help your products get matched.
Hyper-personalization
Tailoring what each shopper sees to their behavior, beyond "Hi, first name". On Shopify, start small: Shopify's Search & Discovery app lets you set related and complementary product recommendations, and customer segments let you send different emails to different groups.
Measuring it
Link in bio
Most platforms give you one clickable link on your profile, so it has to do a lot of work. Point it at a page built for social visitors, not your homepage, and change it when your campaign changes.
UTM parameters
Tags added to the end of a link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that tell your analytics where a visit came from. Without them, a lot of social traffic shows up as "direct" and you can't tell which post worked.
A short link helps with both. We build Short Links, which creates short links on your own store domain, counts clicks and makes a QR code for each one, so your bio link reads yourstore.com/fall and you can see how many people used it (Shopify App Store, free plan available).
Where to start
You don't need all of this at once. Pick the one platform where your customers already spend time, connect it through its Shopify sales channel, and post there consistently for a couple of months with tagged links you can measure. If TikTok is that platform, our post on how TikTok is changing shopping is a good next read.