WebProNews

Among all the social media tools that are available to companies, blogs top the list when it comes to lead generation according to a new survey from HubSpot.

The survey "The State of Inbound Marketing" asked 167 executives and business owners about their marketing strategies.

Respondents said that blogging is currently viewed as the most important lead generation channel as compared to other social media, with 75 percent of those that have tried blogging saying it is "useful" or better.

Other social media that is considered useful or better includes StumbleUpon (55%), YouTube (52%), Facebook (48%), Delicious (47%) and Digg (47%). MySpace was thought as being the least useful (22%).

With millions of blogs on the Internet, businesses are using them to offer compelling content to their customers. Nearly half (48%) of survey respondents say they publish a company blog. More than  of these company blogs publish content at least weekly. This reveals that many corporate bloggers are committing to publishing content at a reasonable consistent rate.

Corporate blogging does face challenges. Respondents said their biggest frustration with blogging was "time."

"We believe as companies understand the effect blogs are having on sales leads, they will dedicate greater amounts of staff resources to blogging, helping to alleviate such problems," the report concluded.