Although social media marketing is relatively new, there has been enough data gathered for us to view trends and overall opinions of this new type of marketing. Michael Stelzner from WhitePaperSource has put out an in depth study on social media marketing. The study was based on interviews of over 900 social media users and marketers. Some highlights from the report include:

• Top ten social media questions marketers want answered
• The time commitment of social media marketing
• The benefits of social media marketing
• Commonly used social media tools
• Social media tools that people want to learn more about

If you are interested in taking a little peak into the findings, below are some high-level points of what was discovered from this study:

• The top three questions marketers want answered about social media marketing are: (1) what are the best tactics to use, (2) how do I measure the effectiveness of social media and (3) where do I start?
• Marketers are new to social media. 88% of those interviewed are using social media for their business, but 72% said they had only been utilizing it for a few months.
• To go along with the bullet point at the top referring to the time commitment, it was found from this study that 64% of marketers interviewed are using social media for five hours or more each week and 39% for ten hours or more weekly.
• The top benefit uncovered in this study was generating exposure to your business, followed by increased traffic and building new business relationships.
• The top social media tools used by the marketers interviewed were Twitter, blogs, Linkedin and Facebook (in that order).
• The social media tools that marketers want to learn most about are social bookmarking sites, followed by Twitter.

This is just a quick glance of the overall study. If you want to view the full whitepaper, check it out at: http://marketingwhitepapers.s3.amazonaws.com/smss09/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport.pdf