Social Media Marketing (SMM) has transformed customer engagement in terms of effective interaction, brand promotion, and relationship building - providing dynamic forums to connect with customers in real time. This paper addresses the complexities of SMM in the context of customer engagement and seeks to explore the multiplicious antecedents of SMM, the range of both positive and negative implications, in a systematic and analytical manner. On the positive side, SMM provides better engagement opportunities with customers, increase brand loyalty, allows for rapid feedback, and provides brand visibility. Businesses can create emotionally engaged relationships with customers and foster participatory engagement through personalized content, user-generated posts, and influencer collaborations. The SMM experience presents challenges as well. Negative consequences, such as information overload, miscommunication, loss of brand control, and data privacy concerns, can adversely impact brand reputation and consumer trust. In order to develop meaningful engagement, organizations must also balance the increased demands for content and engaged responsiveness on behalf of customer engagement. To solidify the understanding of these challenges and positive implications, the proposed study outlines a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) model for comparing SMM strategies based on outcome engagement, operational costs and risk exposure. The findings demonstrate, while customer-driven and interactive strategies are inherently the best engagement, real-time campaigns must be cognizant of any reputational or ethical concern. The study calls for balanced and data-driven SMM, outlining the need for planning and strategy prior to implementation, and ethical use of any data, ethical consideration of 'real-time', not overshadowed by performance measures system to direct and measure outcomes. For organizations to promote meaningful engagement - within increasingly digitally driven customer engagement environment - this study enhances understanding of how businesses can use social media engagement as a meaningful experience, rather than solely for reach. This study considers future work as employing AI and predictive analytics frameworks for engagement planning and a proactive methodology instead of reactive transactional models