WebProNews

Author and WebProNews Blog Partner Michael Stelzner, has put together an interesting report based on a survey of 900 marketers. The report looks at the state of social media marketing. Interesting stats from the report include:

- 88% indicated they were employing social media for marketing purposes

- 72% have only been using social media marketing for a few months

- 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week

- 39% are using it for 10 hours a week

- 81% say the number-one benefit is generating exposure, followed by increasing traffic and building new business relationships

- Over half saw a rise in search engine rankings

- Out of social media tools marketers most wanted to learn about, social bookmarking sites ranked highest followed by Twitter.

Marketers and business owners still have a lot of questions about social media marketing. The report looks at the top ten questions they have:

1. What are the best tactics to use?

2. How do I measure the effectiveness of social media?

3. Where do I start?

4. How do I manage the social balance?

5. What are the best sites and tools out there?

6. How do I make the most of my available time?

7. How do I find and focus my efforts on my target audience?

8. How do I convert my social media marketing efforts into tangible results?

9. How do I cohesively tie different social media efforts together?

10. Does social media marketing work, and if so, how effective is it?

Stelzner's report contains plenty more information than what is sampled here, and it paints a pretty interesting picture of the overall impression of social media marketing. Most people appear to have accepted that they should be using it in one form or another, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, and there is a large thirst for knowledge in this area.

The medium is still in its youth, yet continues to evolve rapidly. Some questions don't have any concrete answers, and are perhaps best answered by the marketers/business owners themselves. Not every business is going to find success through social media marketing in the same manner. That's one of the greatest appeals of the medium though. There are so many possibilities.

You can see Stelzner's full report as well as a video narrated by Stelzner himself here. 

Have the Answer to one of the top 10 questions? Share it here.

Have another question about social media marketing? Ask it.