It’s a broad question, and it may seem simple, but it still pays to have a solid definition of social media marketing. While you may know the platforms that brands prefer, what you really need to know is how marketing and advertising on social media can manifest in one of two major ways.

If you’ve known where to look, you’ll already have a solid grasp on what an influencer is, and you might even know where to find some. You’ll have heard of what Influencer Marketing Hub calls ‘the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others’, and with good reason. However, it would be sensible for us to remember, when trying to understand what social media marketing is, that influencers weren’t always considered marketable. Paid ads may seem a bit passé now, but according to Integral Ad Science they’ve been a feature of the internet since 1994. Facebook started experimenting with advertising in 2004, and YouTube began their (infamously irritating) flirtation with ad placement in 2007. The rest, as they say, is history.

Now we’ve had a brief walk down memory lane, let’s get back to what you need to know about social media today. Influencer marketing does seem to be the name of the game, according to the numbers. An oft-touted statistic from 2016 states that nearly 50% of contemporary Twitter users had purchased products based on an influencer’s tweets, and we can only expect that this figure has ballooned since then. This suggests how modern social media marketing has become a two-headed beast.

Firstly, paid ads are exactly what you’d expect. You can compare them to clickable magazine adverts, or an infomercial you can enter by walking into your TV screen. While bound by older conventions, paid ads still present a technological evolution. Specifically, platforms use algorithms alongside user data to direct your ads towards your desired audience. Other innovations include the recent success of carousel ads on LinkedIn, showing that new ways to improve your CTR are cropping up every day. What really holds this kind of advertising back is the desire modern consumers have to build some kind of relationship with their preferred brand – after all, adverts have traditionally been a one-sided conversation. Relying on a platform itself to champion your content is, to coin a phrase, like entering a walled garden. Essentially, Facebook and Twitter are closed ecosystems when it comes to ad placement, like magazines and TV before them.

Meanwhile, influencer marketing is more fluid. If any one influencer has a loyal following that provides decent engagement, a brand can trust in the traction that influencer already has. I always think of this new dimension of advertising as the relatability market, and sponsoring an influencer will loan your brand a portion of that influencer’s own relatability. Open-minded brands can benefit enormously from an influencer’s greatest asset: the enthusiasm of their fans. We all ignore ads, but are less likely to ignore content from creators we love. This is why Komodo are so glad to be working with influencers of all shapes and sizes from all over the world. We get to support creators whose work we admire and enjoy, all while tasking our in-house production teams with building bridges between the biggest brands and the influencers whose audiences they need to reach.

What is social media marketing, you ask? I’d say it’s what you make of it, but then again, it never hurts to have a little help.