In one of the latest signs that social media marketing has become the centerpiece of many companies’ overall marketing strategies, it was recently reported that Peleton had hired Leslie Berland as its new chief marketing officer. Berland formerly held the same position at Twitter, where she also served as “head of people” for approximately four years.

It seems fair to assume that her multiple roles with the social media giant were at least as important as her marketing experience when Peleton sought to hire her. The fitness company’s CEO Barry McCarthy cited Berland’s accomplishments in that field when speaking to the press, but also noted that she “understands the critical importance of storytelling and engaging current and future Peleton members.”

Of course, in the current landscape, brand-oriented storytelling is very often delivered via social media marketing. And social media also represents an essential vector for customer engagement, as well as group cohesion within companies. Awareness of these facts has helped to fuel a trend whereby more and more marketing executives are being recruited after departure from social media companies, or promoted directly out of social media roles, including mere internships, at companies that are striving to update their marketing strategies.

And even in situations where the leadership of marketing departments has remained more or less unchanged, the ever-growing prominence of social media marketing has allowed younger employees working within that niche to eclipse their older and more highly-placed colleagues. Fast Company articulated this reality in an article published earlier this month which described “How Gen Z social media managers became the new CMOs.”

This shift has proven quite successful for some of the companies that have embraced it and have thereby demonstrated a clear understanding of the importance of social media marketing.

The Fast Company article made direct reference to figures like DuoLingo’s Zaria Parvez, who earned the company a Social Media Marketer of the Year award from Ad Age and then earned herself the title of “global social media manager” at the age of only 24. She and others like her have almost single-handedly driven engagement with their brands among young consumers, often at a fraction of the cost and with a fraction of the advance planning of traditional marketing.

As Fast Company also notes, TikTok alone now has more than one billion active users and the platform generates an estimated 10 billion dollars in ad revenue. In the past, this very blog has pointed to the short video-sharing platform as potentially fertile ground upon which to build a social media marketing campaign.

Recent trends indicate that companies which heeded that advice have seen significant returns on their investment. It is not too late for other companies to follow suit and take advantage of the continuing growth of TikTok as a social media marketing platform. Neither is it too late to adopt the more general wisdom of recognizing social media as the foundation upon which most modern marketing strategies should be built.