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New research has found that almost three out of five respondents currently used social media as a communications tool in their daily jobs – up 22% on last year.

A further 17% said that, while they did not employ social media techniques regularly, they were interested in doing so.

But 22.4% pointed out that, although they would like to understand the medium more, they found it difficult to unearth genuine ‘experts’ in the field to help them.

Just under a quarter of marcoms professionals are currently denied access to social networking sites by their IT departments, down from 46% last year, the study showed, which makes campaign execution and monitoring impossible for them.

Among those that are in a position to undertake such monitoring, however, by far the most popular online tool was Google Alerts, which is free (45.5% of those questioned). Some 37% undertake ad hoc monitoring in-house, while Radian 6 is the most popular paid-for tool (14.3%).

Twitter, meanwhile, is the social network of choice, with 61% of respondents saying that they use it regularly as a means of distributing new stories, up from 28% last year.

But about half of those questioned were unsure where ultimate responsibility for social media communications should reside, indicating that it was currently spread between a range of disciplines. Some 23% thought it should be handled by PR staff and 11% by digital experts.

Interestingly, however, about three out of ten respondents also believed there were simply too many social networks around these days, while about 12% thought that they were becoming too commercial.