Social media is changing the digital marketing landscape. In the past 5 years, social media has become a major component of online marketing, embraced by small business owners and major corporations. Social media has become such a major part of online marketing; some corporations create divisions in their corporations for the sole purpose of conducting marketing on social media outlets.

In the past, social media websites were not considered important for marketing, now they are considered to be highly important. The importance placed on them has led to some websites being valued at billions of dollars.

How social media became ingrained into digital marketing

The purpose of marketing is to place a product or service in front of an audience, the larger the audience the better for digital marketing. When social media websites were first created, they were ignored by the general business world. When they were first created, they were mainly used by young teens to stay in touch with each other.

Over the years, the audience of people using these websites began to encompass all ages; the popularity of these websites also began to increase. Many of the more popular social media websites today started out only being used by a small number of people in a localized environment such as a college, but during the last five years these websites have gone global.

Social media websites have become part of people’s lives the same way telephones are. A large majority of people in the world have some sort of social media presence. Previously, businesses only saw social media websites as a place for people to play, after these websites became global, they saw them as a place to connect with a large audience and make some money. In comparison to other media outlets, social media websites dominate when it comes to viewership among consumers.

Events such as the Super Bowl have nowhere near the viewership numbers Facebook, Digg and other social media websites have on a daily basis. The audience social media websites attract is too large for profit driven businesses to ignore. At this point in time, business ads can always be seen on social media website.

Many businesses also have business profiles on social media websites; some businesses even setup fake user profiles, or hire people, to talk to people on social media websites and tell them positive things about their businesses. Social media outlets used to be places where people could interact with each other without seeing ads, now it is becoming the marketing domain of entrepreneurs.