What is Social Media Marketing? Meaning, Importance, Advantages, and More

Social media marketing is the use of a combination of different platforms to promote a brand, product, or service and reach a diverse audience.

 

 

 

With the increasing popularity of social media, businesses are using it as a primary tool to connect with their target audience. Social media marketing allows companies to reach a large number of people in a cost-effective and targeted manner, making it an essential component of any modern marketing strategy. This article will help you get started with it. 

Any promotion of products or services or brand communication on social networks, including Instagram, X (fka Twitter), Facebook (Meta), LinkedIn, and YouTube, is social media marketing (SMM). 

Businesses use social media platforms to grow followers, interact in real-time, post engaging content, monitor and respond to brand mentions or feedback and analyse marketing efforts. 

Social media marketing is a crucial part of digital marketing. For B2B and B2C companies, not having a social media account is no longer optional. It increases brand awareness, improves customer relationships, drives website traffic, and converts leads. 

You can learn more about it with the best social media marketing courses online. 

 

Facebook is a widely used platform and has been for years. Other recent contenders include YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. 

Today, each social media platform caters to a specific audience. You can read more about the how businesses leverage the best social media platforms. 

For example, TikTok is dominated by 60% Gen Zers (Wallaroo Media), Instagram by 70% millennials (Social Pilot), and LinkedIn by working professionals. 

Brands tailor appropriate content for each platform and audience while creating a relevant social media strategy. There also are various formats to use in social media marketing. Instagram and TikTok reels, stories, livestreaming videos, and carousel posts, among others, are popular. This is updated info from Datareportal. 

Top Social Media Platforms & No. of Users in 2025	Uses
Facebook - 2.28 Billion	Interacting with customers, sharing updates and promoting products via plain texts, images, videos, livestreaming, carousel, stories
YouTube - 2.53 Billion	Sharing videos through video tutorials, video podcasts, music videos, explainer videos, livestreaming, shorts
Instagram - 1.74 Billion	Showcasing products or services through testimonials, behind-the-scenes, brand stories, giveaways, live videos, carousels, user-generated content
TikTok - 1.59 Billion	Sharing and engaging with customers with social media challenges, trending hashtag videos, dance videos
Reddit - 606 Billion	Sharing updates, engaging with customers and generating leads through text, links, images, AskmeAnything (AMA)
LinkedIn - 1.20 Billion	Professional networking and reaching out to other businesses with blog posts, industry links, brand photos, polls
Pinterest - 340 million	Idea pins and video pins are used for showcasing products through visually appealing images
Snapchat - 709 Billion	Images, videos, stories, snaps for displaying products
X - 586 Million	Sharing updates and engaging with customers quickly through industry news, blogs, text, images, videos

 

If you have a look at the Airbnb digital marketing strategy, you will see it has a cross channel social media strategy to highlight its core message of building a community of belongingness among travellers and hosts. The brand’s main channels for social media marketing are Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.

Typing #airbnb on Instagram alone will have showed you 8.9 million posts in 2023. Come 2025, the same hashtag has 12.7 million posts. Instagram works wonders for the brand as the platform caters to the travel industry. 

There is user-generated content from its customers, celebrities spending luxurious vacations, and macro to nano influencers enjoying the local life of the locations they visit. 

The brand uses Twitter to resolve customer queries. It also creates promotional content and offers the latest company news on Twitter and Instagram.

 

Advantages of Social Media Marketing

Building Connections Directly

Social media allows you to communicate with your audiences more instantly. If they are interested in your business and enjoy your posts, they will remain your followers. You can build conversations, ask for feedback, offer discounts, and know what makes your audience like your posts. 

Meeting Customer Demands Fast 

Social media channels offer a personal connection with customers. It can be used for gathering customer feedback on products or services. 

If you are a new business, it is important to be accessible to your customers. Brands such as Domino’s use Twitter to resolve queries and pain points of customers promptly. 

Social media allows a business to maintain relationships with customers. When done correctly, metrics such as Customer Lifetime Value increase. 

Affordable for Any Budget 

If you rely on organic posts and engagement, all social media platforms are free to join. You won’t have to pay for posting. Still, you will have to invest in a social media team that can handle the posting frequency and maintain consistency in all communications across social networks. 

Growing Brand Reach from Social Media Platforms to Your Website

One of the main purposes of social media marketing for any business is to grow its audience. Social media is challenging as the environment is already too saturated. But the relevant content appropriate to your business’s target audience can increase engagement on social media platforms. It can also drive traffic to your website. 

Researching Competitors Becomes Easier 

Every business has competitors, and all of them are on social media. You can research your competition in your industry, monitor how they use social media, and find better ways to engage audiences than your competitors.

Many Ways to Increase Sales 

Giveaways and discounts through participation in contests or following your handle can increase sales faster. Even influencer collaborations can get you more followers and improve your sales. 

Evaluating Performance in Real Time 

Analysing your marketing efforts on social media is more transparent and accurate than in traditional advertising. You get to know how social media users engage with your posts through likes, comments, and shares. YouTube offers analytics showing how many total hours people viewed your video. Instagram also shows your channel analytics. 

 

 

Reason	Description
Some Tactics Can Seem Offensive	Since a diverse audience uses social media, some can find a post offensive, and they may spread the word negatively about your brand
Spreading of Wrong Rumours	Reputation of brands can suffer when some unhappy customers post wrong information on social media
Negative Feedback	Unhappy customers leave negative feedback on comments and everyone can see those
Marketing Campaigns Can Take Too Much Time	For small businesses, the time and resources required to run and tweak campaigns can be time-consuming

Learn more about the impact of social media on businesses and society. 

 

These are some of the most common terms that you will come across in social media marketing. 

Term	Description
Geotag/Geotagging	An image, video, or any content that has a single coordinate point
Hashtag (#)	Words or phrases beginning with #
Feed	Scrollable content on social media platforms
Tag/Tagging	Linking to another profile on Instagram and Facebook
GIF	Graphics Interchange Format or GIF is an image file to react on social media without speaking
Meme	Used to express feelings humorously and are representative of a specific audience
Group	Online communities on social media that can be private or public
Targeting	Choosing a set of audience to show ads on social media
Monitoring	Identifying what the audience talks about the brand on social media
Listening	Interpreting brand mentions as well as overall marketing environment
User-generated Content	Content created by customers for brands with their personal handles/accounts
Viral	When a piece of content suddenly appeals to a large audience in a short time
Handle	Describes username on Instagram or Twitter
Follower	Audience/users who subscribe or follow businesses or people because they offer some kind of value
Influencer	One who is a credible source in a specific industry
Story	Videos or images that last for 24 hours
Repost	Sharing another user’s content within the same social media platform (On X/Twitter, it is called Retweet. On Instagram, it is called Regramming)
Bio	Short introduction of the user on social media platform
Cross Channel	Strategy used for multiple social networks
Native advertising	Showing sponsored ads that look like organic posts on the feed
Social selling	Using social media for sales

 

These are the five pillars of social media marketing, used by brands everywhere. 

1. Creating a Social Media Strategy 

A brand’s success on social media is possible with a social media strategy. Factors including choosing the right platforms for the target audience, determining the type of posts, and frequency are essential. 

2. Publishing 

After formulating a strategy with a complete planning process, it is time to publish content. It is vital to consider consistency in your tonality. The content must align with the brand’s core values. 

3. Listening 

Social listening is the next step that brands focus on after publishing content on social media. 

Brands look at the audience's engagement and how the audience thinks of them across social media channels. 

Taking action based on the responses of the larger audience preferences and responses is important. 

4. Analytics

This is to look at the metrics such as user behaviour, engagement rate, and conversion rate. You can tweak your marketing campaign on social media based on the analytics. 

5. Advertising

When the brand grows an audience, it can choose to post and gain followers organically. But growing organically can take more time. 

Brands invest in social media advertising too. 

Through paid ads, the brand can focus on reaching specific demographics. Sponsored ads, search ads, etc., are some examples. 

Then there are earned and shared media apart from the owned media from the brand. Shared media is when some followers share the brand’s posts voluntarily. User-generated content is an example of shared media. Earned media is earned through public relations. 

 

There are four main types of social media marketing.

Type of Social Media Marketing	Description
Influencer Marketing	Collaborating with niche industry experts
Advertising	Sponsored ads
Social media management	Managing an online community, online reputation management
Content marketing	Creating images, videos, reels, shorts

 

 

Facebook (Meta)

Metric	Description
Number of Fans	Those who like or follow a business page
Follower Demographics	Gender, country, city, language
Engagement Rate	Engagement Rate = (Engagements x 100) ÷ Total Reach
Post Reach	Total people who saw a Facebook post

YouTube

Metric	Description
Watch Time	The time viewers spend on viewing the channel’s videos
Views	Views on all types of content on the channel
Audience Retention	Ratio of viewers watching and leaving a video at one moment
Post Like Rate	Ratio of viewers who liked the post
Impressions click-through-rate	How videos are watched by viewers when they view the thumbnail

While these are native analytics solutions, there are dedicated social media analytics platforms that today's marketers use. 

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