A recent blog article from MediaPost examines the role that social media is starting to play by supporting existing forms of marketing, such as email marketing. It claims that social media is now a useful tool to help develop more targeted, relevant and successful email marketing campaigns, by extending the reach of these mailings using social sharing features. This means that recipients will share the content with friends who might be interested, which then helps to build brand awareness and potential develop the original email list with targeted contacts.

Social media is also seen as a valuable tool to build new email lists from scratch. Running promotions through Facebook or Twitter can create interest and involvement for future use, as long as the incentive relates to the long-term target market as well. As the article says, marketers will often attract prospects to their website and building email campaign lists through the use of promotions, but social media is unique because it "disarms prospects by building a connection with them in advance".