The previous and future trend of social media marketing research: a bibliometric analysis

Marketers are tailoring their strategies to embrace the significant advantage of social media interaction. Considering the value of social media marketing in the corporate world and academic publication, it is necessary to understand the research trend of this field and to understand the future research directions in this field. The aim of this research is to examine the research landscape of the social media marketing field by using comprehensive bibliometric analysis. A total of 768 documents taken from the reputed database namely Web of Science (WoS) published within the last 12 years. The study will help to know the trend of publication, the top articles contributed in terms of journals, scholars, citations, and impact factors. It will also help to identify the trending topics relevant to authors, affiliations, and countries that have made contributions to the field of social media marketing and help young scholars to identify the conceptual structure of the topic as presented along with the social network structure of a particular scientific community, build a scope of additional research in this field and assist the marketers and practitioners to make decisions and build effective social media marketing strategies for customer acquisition towards sustainable business in this new digital age.