Towards a Process Model for Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) provides marketers new opportunities to promote a brand and a set of tools to engage with consumers. Marketers have to understand the social media (SM) landscape and the opportunities that it offers to the consumers, who now have more power because they are able to influence a brand´s reputation positively or negatively. For this purpose, organizations are following a SMM strategy. In fact, a successful SMM requires not just knowledge of its organization but also a well-conceived plan of how it can be used to achieve the organization´s goals. However, academic and anecdotal evidence of corporate cases highlights the challenge for organizations to deeply understand the SM landscape in order to derive corporate results. Based on a comprehensive theoretical literature review that seeks to identify the stages of SMM and SM management processes, as operationalized by academics and organizations, we propose an integrated conceptual model.