Social media marketing uses social platforms to market your business — posting organic content like photos and videos, tracked through built-in analytics tools. It's low-cost to start and gives you the freedom to post whatever's genuinely engaging.

The benefits go well beyond visibility: branding, lead generation, building user communities, and keeping your target customers updated on what you offer. About 90% of businesses report a real response from social media marketing in the audiences they target.

Facebook leads with 2.6 billion users worldwide; Twitter sees 330 million tweets a day; and Instagram has over 25 million active businesses. We also cover Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest and LinkedIn — picking platforms based on where your actual audience spends time.