Wednesday Words: Application Programing Interface (API)

If you have a website/blog for your brand, you may have heard that there are various APIs for social media to use to integrate your website and or forums with that form of social media.  API is short for Application Programming Interface and it allows software applications to interact with other software applications.

With websites, you often have to work with various social media developer tools and their API to get plugins for that social media to work on your website.

A great example of use of social media API is Xenforo forums. They have a plugin which works with Facebook and Twitter's API's to allow users to register and login to forums via their social media accounts.

Another example is the "Like" widgets you can find on various Wordpress based sites (like mine here: http://www.gracesnoke.com ).  These all make use of APIs.

For more information, check out developer tools on Facebook and Twitter.

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media. These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media. You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.