What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

Social media marketing is the use of social media—the platforms on which users build social networks and share information—to build a company's brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. In addition to providing companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones, SMM has purpose-built data analytics that allows marketers to track the success of their efforts and identify even more ways to engage.

According to DataReportal and Kepios, there were 5.31 billion social media identities across the world as of April 2025.1 As a result, SMM has incredible reach to consumers. Let's take a closer look at the strategies and practices and drive social media marketing.

Key Takeaways

• Social media marketing uses social media and social networks—like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram—to market products and services, engage with existing customers, and reach new ones.
• The power of social media marketing comes from the unparalleled capacity of social media in three core marketing areas: connection, interaction, and customer data.
• Social media marketing has transformed the way businesses can influence consumer behavior—from promoting content that drives engagement to extracting personal data that makes messaging resonate with users.
• Because social media today is so ubiquitous, marketing techniques using these platforms are extremely important for businesses.
• Social media marketing is often more cost-effective with great exposure, though it requires ongoing maintenance and might have unintended negative feedback consequences.

  Why Is Social Media Marketing (SMM) So Powerful?

The power of SMM is driven by the unparalleled capacity of social media in three core marketing areas: connection, interaction, and customer data.

Customer Data

A well-designed social media marketing plan delivers another invaluable resource to boost marketing outcomes: customer data. Rather than being overwhelmed by the 3Vs of big data (volume, variety, and velocity), SMM tools have the capacity not only to extract customer data but also to turn this gold into actionable market analysis—or even to use the data to crowdsource new strategies.

       How Social Media Marketing (SMM) Works

As platforms like Facebook, X, and Instagram took off, social media transformed how we connect and how businesses can influence consumer behavior—from promoting content that drives engagement to extracting geographic, demographic, and personal information that makes messaging resonate with users.

SMM Action Plan

The more targeted your SMM strategy is, the more effective it will be. Hootsuite, a leading software provider in the social media management space, recommends the following action plan to build an SMM campaign that has an execution framework as well as performance metrics:2

• Align SMM goals to clear business objectives
• Learn your target customer (age, location, income, job title, industry, interests)
• Conduct a competitive analysis of your competition (successes and failures)
• Audit your current SMM (successes and failures)
• Create a calendar for SMM content delivery
• Create best-in-class content
• Track performance and adjust SMM strategy as needed

           Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Compared to traditional marketing, social media marketing has several distinct advantages, including the fact that SMM has two kinds of interaction that enable targeted customer relationship management (CRM) tools: both customer-to-customer and firm-to-customer. In other words, while traditional marketing tracks customer value primarily by capturing purchase activity, SMM can track customer value directly (through purchases) and indirectly (through product referrals).