How do businesses use social media? A study from Booz & Company and Buddy Media, and shared by Marketing Pilgrim’s Cynthia Boris, provides some insight. Some results are not so surprising—for example, 96% of respondents use their top social media platforms for advertising and promotions, 88% for public relations, and 75% for customer service.

But further down on the list, respondents said they used social media for what might be called intelligence-related purposes, like market research (56%) and product development (40%).

So if your business isn’t in the portion using web for intelligence, what are you waiting for? Use online monitoring to learn:

• What your customers really want…
• What your target audience is saying online about your biggest competitor…
• What trends suggest about where your market is headed…

But (and we say it all the time here at Social Strategy1) best-in-class social media data requires analysis from in-the-know business experts. Let our team show you how we transform online data into the actionable insights that build a competitive advantage.

Image Courtesy of the Touchbase Blog.