Social media marketing is a term reserved for a relatively young area of online marketing. Recently we see a lot of confusion between terms “social media marketing“, “online marketing” and “digital marketing“. The tendency to confuse those terms and use them as synonyms is clearly seen in the job postings.
It seems the majority of hiring companies and recruiters have yet to figure out the appropriate application for these terms and they continue to use them interchangeably.
While there are a lot of similarities, a job titled “Director of Social Media Marketing” (for example) is much less demanding expertise –wise than a job with a title “Director of Digital Marketing“. It has smaller responsibilities and requires narrower knowledge and experience.
Theoretically, it should require fewer skills. Practically employers throw in a description for any social media marketing job a lot of skills that are more relevant to either online marketing or digital marketing.
We’ll discuss the difference between social media marketing and online marketing in later posts.
For now let’s just concentrate on the exploration of the differences between digital and social marketing.
The Difference between Social Media Marketing and Digital Marketing
Social media marketing is one of sub- categories of marketing industry. It concentrates on marketing products and services through social media (social networks, blogosphere, wikis, video and audio sharing sites, social bookmarking, etc).
Very closely related to social media marketing is social media branding. It also utilizes social media, yet instead of dealing with products and services its main purpose is to grow awareness about the company, improve company’s brand and mitigate negative reactions and responses as much as possible. In a nutshell the “product” of a social media branding is increased brand recognition and positive buzz about the company.
Social media marketing is one of the components of digital marketing along with SEO, email marketing, PPV, PPC, banner advertising, mobile marketing and various forms of digital advertising – billboards, DTV (digital television), etc
The roots of confusion probably lie in the nature of media channels. Mobile networks are a mobile media in a sense that they provide the tools for information delivery and two-way communications. At the same time mobile gadgets could be used to connect to social media sites, and in this regards they serve as a medium for social marketing platforms.
Social media channels could be used to deliver digital advertising in various formats. In this case they serve as a medium for display advertising. And of course social media delivers information and facilitates social connections. In this case social media plays its main role and serve, well, as a media 
Conclusion: All above mentioned forms of advertising and marketing are closely related, tightly interwoven and should be used together to achieve the best possible results. Yet they have some distinctive boundaries that place them either within a bigger digital marketing circle or smaller circle dedicated specifically to social media marketing.
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