• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, March 1, 2016

Most marketers have embraced social media as an indispensable channel for reaching consumers, but that doesn’t mean they think they know what they’re doing. In fact, large majorities are still unsure how to approach social media marketing, including what the true value of social data is, according to a new survey by North Highland, which specializes in social influencer strategies.

On the positive side, North Highland surveyed 211 top marketing and advertising execs from businesses with revenues of $500 million a year or more in the U.S. and UK and found that 66% view social media as an important tool to engage and communicate with an influential audience, while 63% view it as an important tool for managing their organization’s reputation or brand.

By the same token, however, just 35% view social media as a legitimate source of marketing intelligence, and just 26% view it as a source of information to guide strategic decisions. Furthermore 52% admit they have a limited understanding of who is part of the social communities they’re interacting with, and another 11% said they have no insights at all into who these communities are composed of.

This isn’t the only area where brands are falling short. When it comes to customer service, North Highland noted that 53% of consumers who pose a question to a brand on Twitter expect a response within one hour, a figure which rises to 72% when the customers are making a complaint; 70% of consumers said they would stop buying a brand because of an unsatisfactory social media experience. But 80% of marketers said they don’t use insights gathered from social media for their customer service strategy.

The results of the North Highland survey echo concerns uncovered in other studies.  Last month I wrote about the most recent CMO Survey from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, which polled 298 marketing bigwigs about their marketing strategies, which found that 3.4% rated social media “highly effective” for marketing purposes, and 10.4% viewed it as “above average,” while 40% graded it “below average” and 49.8% pegged it as just “average. In fact, 47.9% said they haven’t been able to show any impact at all.

The Duke Fuqua survey also found that CMOs don’t feel their companies are doing a particularly good job integrating customer information gathered from social media with customer information from other sources, with respondents giving an average effectiveness score of 3.4 out of seven to their efforts here.