Digital and social media marketing: a bibliometric mapping from 2020 to 2025

Abstract Digital and social media marketing is reshaping how firms communicate with consumers, gather market intelligence, manage customer journeys, and build brand relationships. This study followed the PRISMA framework to select relevant Scopus-indexed articles between 2020 and 2025 under the business, management, and accounting subject area, using the search terms “digital marketing” and “social media marketing” in titles, abstracts, and keywords. The search, conducted on 20 February 2026 and restricted to open-access, English-language, final-stage journal articles, yielded 1,054 articles. Performance analysis, citation analysis, author-keyword co-occurrence mapping, an average-publication-year overlay, co-citation analysis, and bibliographic coupling were conducted using VOSviewer. Findings reveal publication growth, particularly during 2024 and 2025. Indonesia was the leading country by publications, whereas the UK was the most influential country by citations. Additionally, the “Journal of Business Research” is the most influential, while “Cogent Business & Management” is the most productive journal; the most-cited document is “Setting the future of digital and social media marketing research: Perspectives and research propositions,” with 1,806 citations, produced by “International Journal of Information Management.” Four of the ten prominent authors published six papers each, including Saura, J.R., and Huertas-Garcia, R., both affiliated with Spanish institutions. Keyword mapping identifies digital marketing, social media marketing, social media, consumer behavior, marketing, and purchase intention as central themes. This study clarifies the post-2020 knowledge structure of the open-access segment of this literature, proposes that digital and social media marketing forms a single domain, and identifies future research directions for marketing ecosystems.