By Sergio Balegno, Research Director

Honing in on Target Audiences and Quantifying the Impact of Social Media


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The "R" in MarketingSherpa’s Social Marketing ROAD Map stands for Research, or the gathering of intelligence on target audiences, their social use and competition. Research is the first important step to mapping an effective social marketing strategy, and this chart shows the percentage of organizations monitoring each of the quantifiable metrics above.

Organizations use a wide variety of tools, and use multiple tools in tandem, to monitor the dialogue related to their company, brand and competitors across blogs and other social media sites. Not surprisingly, free tools such as Google Search, Google Alerts, Twitter Search and Yahoo! Search, top the list and are used much more broadly than fee-based tools.

For additional research data and insights about social marketing, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report.