And the Winner for Most Important Social Media Channel is ...

[Drumroll] ... Blogs!

Company blogs took the top spot in HubSpot's recent 2010 State of Inbound Marketing report , which surveyed marketing professionals about the importance of various social media channels. The other rated nominees included Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. in order of importance to inbound marketing strategies .

Up from 2009, 85% of users ranked company blogs as "useful" or better this year, showing increased preference for creating conversations around the industry and interacting personally with customers. Twitter came in 2nd place with a huge leap to 71%, and Facebook and YouTube followed suit with increased ratings.

Social news/browsing sites Digg and StumbleUpon dropped rankings over the past year, while MySpace completely fell off the map with only 10% of users rating it as "useful" or better.

Other key findings of the 2010 State of Inbound Marketing report :

• Over 40% of customers using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and company blogs have generated a customer from that channel.
• 88% of companies have either increased or maintained their inbound marketing budget since last year.

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