Social Media as a Platform for Marketing: A Survey

Social media is primarily a tool for online interpersonal communication, but it could also be used for marketing (e.g., promoting products/brands through wordof-mouth on social media, providing online advertising, or extracting customers’ perceptions from communication data). The goal of this study is to provide insights into the welfare issues of social media as a platform for marketing. This article reviews existing research regarding social media use of customers, that of marketers, and the decision-making of social media platformers. For the customer side, we mainly discuss online communication about products and services (i.e., eWOM: electronic word-of-mouth), since it is the most relevant to marketing; for the marketer side, we focus on marketing activities to approach interpersonal communication, which social media facilitate. We survey existing research mainly in economics and marketing that is relevant to the issues.