Bibliometrics of Social Media Marketing: The Development Status and Quantitative Analysis

The tremendous popularity of social media has broadened a new marketing method, social media marketing, research of which is now being conducted across multiple disciplines. In this paper, 477 articles were analyzed using a bibliometric approach by VOSviewer Software. Authors first traced back the development of social media marketing from 2009 to the first half of 2020. Having an overview of articles related to the area, this paper then revealed the most influential authors, journals and articles, and highlights how more extended studies were required beyond business and marketing categories, as the unearthed gap indicating current research is unbalanced in its focus. In particular, it was found that most research was developed from the perspective of consumer-brand relationship. Grounded in three key questions, this study finally gave a comprehensive analysis and critical profiling and called for distinct directions for future studies in the field of social media marketing research.