Development of social networks of scientists in the World Wide Web creates new schemes for wider awareness of the global scientists’ community of scientific research findings. In this case, existing information technologies are facing difficulties in resolving contradictions, generated by a broad stream of scientific publications and complexity of access to these publications. Resolution of this controversy is carried out thanks to digitalization of scientific content, which predetermines possibility of implementation of new principles for information disseminating, such as SMM (Social Media Marketing). To substantiate and assess SMM, we accepted the hypothesis about possibility of phenomenological presentation of lifecycle of scientific publications with the states of readers’ community: S 1 – unawareness; S 2 –awareness; S 3 – positive attitude; S 4 – citation; S 5 – negative attitude. In view of these states, the model of publication lifecycle based on a Markov chain was constructed. It was proposed to use SMM principles from professional marketing agencies in relation to promotion of scientific content on the Internet. A distinctive feature of this approach is that proposed Markov chain is adjusted to different possible states of reader’s community on assessment of publication by establishing the values of transition probabilities, which are chosen for particular states based on the expert evaluation. We investigated the influence of expansion of readers’ audience, provision of presentation clarity, articles uniqueness, professional orientation, and data objectivity on the distribution of publication readership. Effectiveness of publications promotion with an active authors’ participation to follow up on their publications in social scientific networks was shown.