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148Antonio Castillo Esparcia, Emilia Smolak-Lozanoparticipants and encourage them to develop multiple interactions are commonlydenominated as social media. The element of users´ active participation is thereason for which “social media is perhaps one of the most fluid and dynamicaspects of the Internet”. 2Social media have been converted into platforms for commerce (businessplatform), 3 what means the changes of technologies, communication, marketing,as well as economy and business models, both in terms of the consumers´ habitsand audiences´ behaviors. The effective communication in social environmentof online reality determines the key factors for the company success. Thisstatement can be justified by data coming from webpage – Socialmediaexaminer.com: “Marketers place high value on social media: A significant 90%of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.” Amongthe companies which apply such platforms in daily marketing activities, thesame study reveals that 92% uses the Facebook and 84% of them applies Twitter,being these two the most popular and leading networks both for businessand the clients. As it is concluded in one of the research of Hubspot.com, 75%of social media users consider these media as the best environment to contacta company or to establish relationships with the brand. The real benefitsachieved through application of social media into marketing strategy of thecompanies are illustrated by research conducted by Socialmediaexaminer.comin which the following effects have been mentioned by the surveyed managers:88% indicates the benefit of generated exposure for the business, 72% notifiedan increase of the traffic, for 56% it resulted in new business partnerships,whereas for 49% it brought the reduction of overall marketing expenses and43% admitted the sales to have been improved. To sum up, the basic benefitsof social media strategy are related to visibility, business challenges, reductionof marketing costs and sales improvement.Although, the importance of social media in the marketing strategy and itsbenefits are the subject of professional concerns of management and experts, ithas been so far scarcely discussed from academic point of view. Therefore, thepresent work aims to introduce the basic theoretical concepts related to the socialmedia marketing (SMM): origins and background, definition, model of itsimplementation, tactics and pillars of effective strategy and the tools of effectivecommunication within this new approach.2 A. Charlesworth, Internet marketing. a practical approach, Elsevier, Oxford 2009, p. 287.3 It is also stated by various authors and companies specialized in the area of social media.