An IAB study, in partnership with Opinion Matters, surveyed 80 senior marketers and found that 88% of brands rate social media as important to their business. A third of advertisers planned to allocate between 6% and 20% of their digital marketing budgets to it this year, compared with just 14% last year.

However, there’s still great uncertainty about which department should be responsible for social media in the business. While three-quarters of respondents (73%) said social media should come under the marketing department, it was also found to be the responsibility of PR (33%), customer services (16%), research (12%) and IT teams (7%).

The biggest issue for social media is ROI, due to its qualitative nature. 74% of respondents believed that proving ROI was the greatest challenge for the social media sector. Measurement was viewed as the major stumbling block by 64%, while 57% said that more education about how to best use social media is necessary

Only 7% of respondents haven’t embraced social media in any way, but only 22% have interwoven it into core communications strategy. Of respondents, 20% feature social media in the majority of campaigns, while 23.5% opt to use the medium ad hoc and 27% have tested it with a view to using it again.