What Is Social Media Marketing? A Digital Marketer’s Guide
Social media has evolved far beyond a place to post photos, communicate with friends, and follow brands. Today, social media is an important component of digital marketing, paid advertising, brand development, audience research, customer acquisition, and online reputation.
As a digital marketer with more than 19 years of experience working across AI and digital growth , and online advertising, I have seen social media change considerably over the years.
Social media has become one of the most influential parts of the modern digital landscape. What began primarily as a way for people to connect with friends and share personal updates has evolved into a powerful ecosystem for communication, branding, advertising, customer engagement, and business growth.
At its simplest, social media is a collection of online platforms that allow people and organizations to create content, communicate with others, build communities, and develop relationships.
Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, X, YouTube, and others allow users to publish content and interact with audiences in real time.
How Does Social Media Work?
Most social media platforms allow users to create a profile or account and connect with other people, businesses, organizations, or communities.
Users can then share different types of content, including:
- Text posts
- Photos and graphics
- Videos
- Articles and links
- Stories and short-form content
- Live broadcasts
- Reviews and recommendations
- Comments and discussions
The content people see is generally influenced by the accounts they follow, the communities they participate in, and their interactions with previous content. This creates an ongoing flow of information tailored to individual users and their interests.
Social Media and Personal Branding
Social media isn’t only about communicating with friends. It has also become an important tool for personal branding.
How Businesses Use Social Media
For businesses, social media can function as much more than a publishing channel.
Companies can use social media to:
- Build brand awareness
- Build competativ estrategy
- Create a lasting plan
AI and digital growth
One of the biggest advantages of social media marketing is the ability to communicate directly with potential and existing customers.
Instead of relying entirely on traditional advertising, businesses can participate in conversations and develop relationships with their audiences.
Social Media Marketing and Paid Advertising
Organic social media is only one part of the equation.
- Most major social platforms also provide sophisticated advertising systems that allow marketers to target audiences based on factors such as demographics, interests, behaviors, location, previous website activity, and engagement.
- Paid social advertising can be particularly effective when it is connected to a larger digital marketing strategy.
- For example, a company might use social media advertising to introduce a product to a new audience, retarget people who previously visited its website, and then measure conversions through analytics and tracking systems.
- The goal shouldn’t simply be to generate likes or impressions. Effective social media marketing should ultimately contribute to meaningful business outcomes such as qualified leads, sales, customer acquisition, and revenue.
Social Media Is Constantly Changing
One of the most important things to understand about social media is that it is constantly evolving.
- Platforms change their algorithms, advertising systems, content formats, targeting capabilities, and user experiences. A strategy that worked several years ago may not produce the same results today.
- Short-form video, creator content, communities, social search, artificial intelligence, and increasingly sophisticated advertising platforms have all changed how people discover information online.
- For marketers, this means social media shouldn’t be treated as a set-it-and-forget-it channel. Successful campaigns require testing, measurement, optimization, and an understanding of how audiences behave on each platform.
The Role of Social Media in Digital Marketing
- Social media is most effective when it works together with the rest of a company’s digital marketing strategy.
- Search engine optimization, paid search, email marketing, content marketing, analytics, conversion optimization, and social media can all support one another.
- A customer might discover a company through a Google search, encounter its content on social media, visit the website several times, and eventually become a customer through a retargeting campaign.
Understanding that entire customer journey is much more valuable than looking at any individual channel in isolation. My professional background extends well beyond Mammoth and the Eastern Sierra.
While I have strong ties to the Mammoth region, my digital marketing work has never been restricted by geography. Many of the businesses and audiences I have worked with are located outside the immediate area, including throughout California, Arizona, Utah, and markets across the United States. The Mammoth region itself has a unique combination of seasonal businesses, tourism, hospitality, outdoor recreation, retail, services, and visitors arriving from markets throughout the West. That creates an interesting environment for understanding how local and destination-based businesses can compete for attention online. My experience, however, extends far beyond this regional market. I have worked across ecommerce, healthcare, financial services, home services, solar, hospitality, entertainment, lead generation, and other highly competitive industries. Throughout my career, I have worked with campaigns and businesses operating at significant scale, including opportunities associated with hundreds of millions of dollars in potential annual revenue before sales and marketing costs. “The best marketing doesn’t ask where the customer is—it figures out how to reach them.” That principle has shaped my approach to AI and digital growth: geography can define a market, but effective digital marketing can expand the reach far beyond it.
Learning From Real-World Examples: Robotics, AI, and New Growth Opportunities
- One of the most interesting aspects of digital marketing is that new opportunities often become visible before they become obvious to everyone else.
- I have seen this firsthand in everyday environments. For example, I previously wrote about seeing robotic and AI-driven technology being introduced into grocery-store operations. At first, something like a robotic system moving through a store may simply look like a technological novelty. But from a marketing perspective, it raises much bigger questions.
- What can we learn from what people actually do when they encounter new technology?
- That question is important because some of the best marketing opportunities come from observing behavior rather than simply following existing keyword lists or established marketing channels.
- A new technology can create entirely new searches, conversations, products, services, and customer needs.
- For example, when consumers encounter robotics in a grocery store, they may begin asking:
- Are grocery-store robots replacing employees?
- What does this robot do, anything that needs to be updated? What will the recall, and regression templates be. Can we use this
- I don’t see it that way.
AI systems still need information.
- That information comes from websites, publications, databases, businesses, experts, communities, videos, and other sources.
- If a business wants to appear in AI-generated answers, there still needs to be useful information about that business for these systems to discover, interpret, evaluate, and potentially reference.
- This creates a different opportunity for AI and digital growth
- Instead of asking only
“How do I rank #1 in Google?” we increasingly need to ask, these questions every day, and it does not totally align with your revenue, outside of our escape from outbound clicks, and content stuffing.
“How do I make my brand visible across search engines, AI systems, social platforms, communities, and other digital discovery environments?”
Case-by-Case Scenario #2: The Learned Example
FAQ
Now consider a customer searching for a service.
They might ask an AI system:
“Who are the best companies for this service?”
The AI doesn’t necessarily need one webpage that literally says:
“We are the best company.”
It needs enough information to understand the company and evaluate it in context.
That information might come from the company’s website, third-party publications, reviews, industry resources, social discussions, directories, or other credible sources.
This creates an important distinction between claiming expertise and demonstrating expertise.