Social media is an effective means of communication between consumers and businesses. Businesses use social media to improve consumer engagement and brand equity. This essay provides a brief overview of social media platforms and their effectiveness. This shows that the entire marketing concept has undergone a drastic transformation due to interaction with social media. The essay ends with a conclusion describing what marketers need to pay attention to in order to have a successful social media campaign. Social media is everywhere today and brand pages on sites like Facebook, Google+, YouTube and Twitter have become popular around the world. The concept of marketing has changed with customer engagement on these platforms. Usually, brands continue to improve their relationships and actively communicate with consumers using activities such as reward programs and direct promotions. In this marketing, customers were passive “receivers” of brand messages and various other activities and therefore the companies as such had no control over the development of the brand. Today, consumers engage and get involved in creating branded posts/comments (Hennig-Thurau, et al., 2010), Kozinets, et al., 2010, Libai, et al., 2010) . Every successful business has a brand page on at least Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. Luxury brands like Armani, Burberry or Dolce & Gabbana, Armani or Burberry are investing more in social media (Phan, 2011). Nevertheless, some marketers do not approve of social media and question the merits of putting effort into these promotions, especially marketers are doubtful about the use of mass media platforms for brand promotion exclusive luxury goods (Okonkwo, 2009, Geerts and Veg-Sala, 2011). We have shown that the social ...... middle of paper ...... file from http://img.constantcontact.com/docs/pdf/extend_your_email_effectness.pdf [accessed December 5, 2013].• Chandler , S. (2013), “The hidden benefits of social media marketing: why your strategy may be working better than you think”. [Online] available at http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2013/03/12/the-hidden-benefits-of-social-media-marketing-why-your-strategy- may -work-better-than-you-think/ [December 5, 2013]• Gamache, J. (2013), “Social media engagement drives brand loyalty”. [Online] available at http://www.comerecommended.com/prblog/2013/07/social-media-engagement-boosts-brand-loyalty/ [accessed December 5, 2013].• Oracle (2008), “All depends on the vendor taking advantage of Web 2.0,” Oracle white paper, August. [Online] available at http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/051279.pdf [December 5., 2013]