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Recognising the potential of social media as an integral driver of communication that can create engaged communities through dialogic or two-way conversations, this study seeks to identify and describe the use of social media in creating participants' engagement in various social marketing programmes conducted worldwide between 2005 and 2017. Design/methodology/approach: Twenty-nine social marketing programmes were identified using systematic literature review procedures. Findings: The majority of the identified programmes used Facebook, and social media were mostly employed to share content-based information in an attempt to connect with target audiences, raise awareness, and reach less accessible populations with programme messages. Social media served as an extended channel to traditional media efforts and very few programmes used social media to create mechanisms for supporting their target audiences' ability to revisit their social media communications and encourage them to act as advocates for the programmes' activities. Research limitations/implications: The analysis presented in this paper is limited by the information provided in the identified studies. Originality/value: Despite the growing popularity and significance of social media as a channel for consumer engagement, little has been done to synthesise how social marketers are incorporating the use of social media in their social marketing programmes. This research fills this gap by providing systematic understanding of the use of social media in social marketing programmes to date.

Despite the known benefits offered by social media to create engagement in social marketing programs, scholars have highlighted the need for more evidence-based, practical, and measurable approaches to social media use in social marketing contexts. This netnographic study employed a four-level multi-actor engagement framework originally proposed by Shawky et al. to explore engagement in a single Facebook community. We identified social media measurement tools for assessing connections, interactions, and loyalty of multiple actors which will assist social marketing practitioners’ understanding of different actors’ interactions with the social media content, enabling them to maintain these actors’ levels of engagement, advance their engagement to a higher level, or attract others to expand the community.

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