We’ve come a long way in a very short time. The exponential growth of social media has made it an integral part of the marketer’s toolkit. Social media takes up more than one quarter of all time spent online, and is arguably the quickest, fastest way to reach millions of customers instantly.

Recent research from Pew shows that 73 percent of US online adults use a social network. On a global basis, eMarketer estimated that in 2013, 68 percent of internet users around the world used a social network at least once per month, and they expect it to rise to 75 percent by 2016. Not surprisingly, social media was used by 87 percent of marketers in 2013.