What’s the Difference Between Social Media Marketing and Digital Marketing?

The short answer here is that social media comprises a small part of digital marketing. But that doesn’t mean social media should be discounted. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most consumers and potential customers for small and large businesses alike spend at least a quarter of their internet time on some form of social media. So if you aren’t advertising there in some form, or if your advertising is ineffective, your company is missing out. It’s also important to realize that there are many other facets of digital marketing that social media has no part in. There’s a lot here to unpack, so let’s get started.

Defining Digital Marketing

This field is a big, well, market. Digital marketing is basically how you market online through digital platforms and mediums. It sounds simple, but those platforms are countless, and change depending on the product or service you’re trying to push. What works for TV ads might not translate well to Twitter, and vice versa, without at least changing your strategy.

Defining Internet Marketing

Let’s delve further into digital marketing with internet marketing. Internet marketing is, you guessed it, a specific type of digital marketing that focuses on the internet as a platform. So that means no TV, no radio, no billboards. This is fairly straightforward, but what internet marketing contains is the important part.

Defining Social Media Marketing

Here’s where the kind of marketing we’re after gets defined further. Social media marketing is a type of internet marketing, which in turn is a type of digital marketing. Social media marketing is fairly self-explanatory as well, because these are strategies devoted to marketing on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Just because this type of marketing is niche, doesn’t mean it isn’t important. In fact, social media marketing is becoming more and more important as the internet becomes easier and cheaper to access. The way your company markets on social media will affect your image and public perception, much more so than in the past.

This is all to say, however, that the type of business you’re running will affect where you assign marketing assets. In most cases, it doesn’t take a digital marketing specialist, a digital marketing coordinator, or even a digital marketing director to take your business vision to the next level online. All it takes is a small but capable team dedicated to helping your company succeed. What does success look like? Check out LumberPress.com to learn the details.