While about one-third of world’s population is currently using social media, it has fundamentally changed the landscape of marketing and the way product and company information is exchanged between company and customers. It has provided extended channels and interaction points among customers and between customers and company, which are beyond the traditional marketing and business models. It is turning out to be more powerful than traditional marketing tools and, therefore, needs special attention from marketers to be competitive in the market. It has in particular affected the way consumers are influenced by the external sources of information, other than company designed, sponsored and controlled. It is greatly influencing the way consumers develop their brand preferences and choices and thus brand loyalty and equity. Therefore, there is a great need for marketers to study and establish the relationship between these concepts in order to be competitive in the future. Against this backdrop, the current paper makes an attempt to study the relationship between the social media marketing and the brand equity and proposes a framework wherein the relationships between the underlying variables of the two constructs are established in the light of available literature.

Social media is the usage of web-based and mobile technologies to create, share and consume information and knowledge without any geographical, social, political or demographical boundaries through public interaction in a participatory and collaborative way. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) define social media as “a group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of web 2.0, and allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.” Social media encompasses a wide range of online, word-of-mouth forums including blogs, company-sponsored discussion boards and chat rooms, consumer-to-consumer e-mail, consumer product or service ratings websites and forums, internet discussion boards and forums, moblogs (sites containing digital audio, images, movies, or photographs), and social networking websites, to name a few (Mangold and Faulgd, 2009). Social media employ mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content (Kietzmann et al., 2011). Garnyte and de Avila (2009) argue that social media is a world-wide-web tool which enables users to become active creators of the content, to communicate with each other actively, and to create and exchange various information. Global social media users have passed 2 billion mark, which roughly amounts to about 29% of the world’s population (Kemp, 2015). The emergence of social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) has fundamentally altered the marketing landscape.

Marketing Management, Social Media Marketing, Brand Equity, A Literature Review.