Social media marketing first started with publishing. Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured far beyond being just a place to broadcast content.

Nowadays, businesses use social media in many different ways. For example, a business that is concerned about what people are saying about its brand would monitor social media conversations and respond to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement). A business that wants to understand how it is performing on social media would analyse its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool (social media analytics). A business that wants to reach a specific set of audiences at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads (social media advertising). As a whole, these are often also known as social media management.