One Key role of social media in marketing is increasing brand and product awareness. Getting customers involved through the use of social media sites, apps and games builds awareness and provides consumers with immediate access to information about the product or service.

Social media marketing is far more interactive in nature than traditional tactics. Consumers can interact with organizations and other consumers through comments and questions. Interaction through shares and likes on social media sites such as Facebook, and apps that reward users for sharing their location, consumers become a part of the marketing campaign. Another difference between traditional marketing channels and social media is the types of loyalty programs and the rewards offered. Some social media reward programs offer non-tangible rewards, which provides a financial savings to organizations. For example, social media marketing may use online games that integrate products into the game and offer in game rewards as opposed to monetary rewards or discounts to users.

Although social media will not eliminate traditional forms of marketing altogether, it will become a more important part of marketing campaigns as technology continues to advance and will eventually will play a larger role than traditional marketing channels. Reviewing the steps for creating an advertising campaign provides insight into the advantages of social media marketing. The first and last steps are setting the target audience and evaluating effectiveness. Social media enables marketers to target specific segments more effectively than mass media advertising. Facebook offers market segmentation by age, gender, region, interests, behaviours and physical similarity. The social networking site also provides information that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the marketing efforts such as click rates and shares.