Do you use a listening platform? Maybe a social media monitoring tool? Or work with a social analytics vendor? All of the above? Well if you do, we need your help. Today we're kicking off the second annual report covering the many ways businesses use social media data. Our goal is to find out who uses social data, how they use it, and for which business purposes. To answer these questions, we've created a survey (available here and below) that will ask you about your experience with social listening tools.

Our survey last year created this report, and I'm eager to see how the market has changed over the last year. For example, last year we learned that most listening platform users conduct fairly basic tasks with the tool — such as brand or competitive tracking, or quick market research, as seen in the graph below. Now I want to see if, a year later, an increased percentage of companies use social data for more interactive tasks — such as sales or customer support.

This is a big annual project for us, and it's great fuel for my ongoing research, so please help us out and take this short (5-10 minute) survey on your use of social listening tools. In return, we will send you a free copy of the research — hopefully publishing in early October — with which you can benchmark your current work against the rest of the market, learn about new ways to use listening tools, and get an understanding of how to improve your social data practices.

Click here to take the short social data survey.

And please share this link http://forr.com/sisurvey with any colleagues or friends who use listening tools. Thanks!