A bibliometric analysis of social media advertising research: Mapping prominent trends

Abstract

Despite the growing body of research in the area of social media advertising, there is a lack of review studies that synthesize important trends and emerging future directions. To fill this gap, a bibliometric study was conducted to synthesize global knowledge structure and uncover emerging themes in the area. The dataset included Scopus-indexed literature up to 2023, with the primary keywords "social media advertising," "social media advertisement," and "social media ad". The data was analyzed using the VOSviewer tool and manual content analysis to identify the top contributors and important research trends. Key findings suggest that keywords such as commerce, purchase intention, Facebook, consumer behavior, covid-19, mental health, depression, sales, Instagram, etc. occurred more frequently in the SMA research. Most of the studies fell in three categories i.e. ‘Health’, ‘Covid-19 Pandemic’, and ‘Marketing and Consumer Behavior’.