New Data Reveals How Marketers Use Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

In just a few hours, SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin and HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah will reveal the results from the SEOmoz annual industry survey on the state of SEO and internet marketing in their joint webinar at 1 p.m. EST.
The survey specifically aimed to highlight the state of search engine optimization, internet marketing, and the marketing profession in 2012, and SEOmoz shared this exclusive data with us in order to reveal some key insights about social media usage before the official webinar. So if you're wondering how marketers are leveraging social media for their businesses, we pulled together an infographic snapshot to feature some of results from the 6,491 survey respondents. Either scroll straight down to the infographic, or read through some additional analysis below.

How Marketers Are Using Social Media in 2012

The first statistic highlighted on our infographic reveals that 44.4% of survey respondents self-professed either “advanced” or “expert” level social media ability. This shows that marketers are feeling an increased sense of ability to tackle what was once thought of as a new and unknown technology.
To little surprise in the social media marketing world, Facebook and Twitter lead as the most popular social network. In fact, our own social media lead generation team at HubSpot is big advocates for these two networks! What is surprising, however, is that Google+ emerges as the third most popular network. Google+ has historically been plagued with the "useless" label when it comes to generating social ROI, so one theory behind this ranking could be the high impact Google+ has on SEO.
While LinkedIn falls behind in fifth place, it turns out that 74.1% of marketers use LinkedIn for branding. I found this to be particularly interesting since LinkedIn Company Pages do not provide many options for branding. While they can update their status and add a company logo, marketers don't have the more advanced branding capabilities that they have on more visual networks such as Facebook or Pinterest. One theory behind this statistic could be branding via employees. LinkedIn is an excellent platform for showing off the wonderful talent your employees bring to your company.
Lastly, it turns out that 60.2% of marketers are looking for analysis options, as well as other analytics options, in their social media management tools. This comes as no surprise. When savvy social media marketers are communicating their messages online, they want to know exactly how those efforts are benefiting them by analyzing whether each social strategy is connecting to their end goal: revenue. Tools that report on social media analytics are becoming more and more in demand among marketers, which is exactly why the HubSpot team has worked so hard to provide reach metrics and CTR on all your social media messages, as well as ROI metrics like closed-loop reporting on leads and customers generated from social media, all within the HubSpot Social Media tool.


Want to learn about the complete results from this widely distributed survey, expertly analyzed by Rand Fishkin and Dharmesh Shah? Tune into the co-hosted SEOmoz-HubSpot webinar today at 1 p.m. EST. Register here!