In recent decades, the number of new concepts and terms has risen rapidly in social media. As social media were first created in English-speaking contexts, speakers of other languages need to express the concepts of this field in their own language. It is thus relevant for translators and journalists to understand the ways in which the transfer of such concepts is achieved using linguistic means. In order to do so, in this study a corpus of newspaper articles on social media (Facebook and WhatsApp) written in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese was compiled. The procedures used by Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish language users to transfer frequently used English terms such as ‘app’, ‘tweet’ or ‘smartphone’ were examined. Although many different methods for rendering English terms were recorded on both target languages, some preferences can be noticed. The results of the analysis highlight the most common procedures used when translating social media terms from English into Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish.