In the digital age, whoever has no online presence, in essence doesn't even exist and one of the most accessible types of such presence for businesses is social media presence. But the benefit of social media isn't only in establishing an online presence, but also through many other various benefits; today, social media is used as means of promotion, brand maintenance, communication with consumers, as means of headhunting, market research and others. This paper is an attempt to research at least the majority of ways how the use of social media in business, active or passive, can positively or negatively affect business, by listing real examples of various types of social media use in Croatia and abroad. The researched examples are those of the local Osijek food company Food.hr, the american brands of Starbucks and Tesla and the swedish H&M. Respectively, these are listed as examples of a quality and wide-ranging use of social media as a means of promotion, examples of negative consequences of poor PR decisions, which are results of the existence of social media and the „power of the masses“, and finally the use of social media as a means of guerilla marketing. It has been established that bearing in mind the large number of active users and the presence of corporate profiles on social media, it is something that can, in drastic situations, make or break a business and even though future trends of social media are largely unpredictable and dynamic, much like similar ICT technologies, social media still remains a versatile and significant business factor.