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Recently, Econsultancy released their sixth Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Managing and Measuring Social, produced in partnership with Adobe. The research is based on a survey of more than 650 marketing professionals from agencies and the client-side (45% B2C, 34% B2B and 21% B2B and B2C equally) across industries in Europe and North America with a concentration in the UK and US.

Key findings
The report examines the trends for managing and measuring the business value of social media and provides a snapshot of social media uses, challenges and needs from companies today.

Here are some of the major findings from the report outlined in the infographic:

67% of businesses agree that social media is integral to their marketing mix.
64% use social for brand awareness, 44% for marketing campaigns, 37% for content marketing and only 25% for customer service.
Twitter (86%) and Facebook (86%) are still the most used platforms by businesses.
While 67% believe social marketing needs to be more rooted in data, less than 25% are leveraging social data to optimize their marketing strategies.
41% say that they lack tracking capabilities.

Social is playing a more significant role within decision-making, and indeed over two-thirds of businesses, regardless of size, view it as integral to the marketing mix. But the survey also clearly shows that businesses are struggling on managing and measuring their social media efforts. Like I have already mentioned in my previous analysis of ‘the State of Social Media Marketing Report, it appears that one of the greatest challenges for companies remains getting the right tools and techniques in place backed up by the right resources to measure ROI.

However, being a brand facing some challenges in managing and measuring the social media initiatives in your company, the “Five major steps to superb social media”, suggested at the bottom of the infographic, can be worth a read as a starting point.

61% of U.S. marketers use social media to increase their lead generation.

While the business to consumer (B2C) side of social media is both proven and well established, business to business (B2B) social marketing has been a harder sell. But the effort is paying off. A recent Business.com study showed that 55 percent of B2B survey respondents search for information using social media, and IBM reported an incredible 400 percent increase in sales in a single quarter after implementing a pilot program of social selling.

Some 53 percent of B2B companies actively use Twitter in their marketing efforts, but this is dwarfed by Facebook (90 percent), which generates about twice as many monthly leads overall. However, and as you might expect, it’s LinkedIn that rules the roost – while less than half of businesses actively use the platform, LinkedIn returns more leads than Facebook, Twitter or blogging for B2B marketers.

We’ve seen some novel concepts for agency promotion, timelapse videos, animated videos – now its all about infographics. Presenting data in a visual, easily digestible way to get their message across. And it looks great.

Daily Instagram users has surpassed daily Twitter users in the U.S., according to comScore’s Mobile Metrix, which tracks app and web usage through a metered panel of users.

Instagram usage has exploded since March. It really kinked higher in May, which is a month after it was launched on Android and Facebook acquired it.