More than three-quarters of U.S. marketers say that better customer engagement is the number one business objective within their social media strategy, according to a new report.

However, almost all marketers still believe that social presence, measured by the number of followers and fans on Twitter, Facebook and other channels, is the top metric for evaluating a brand’s effectiveness.

This data comes courtesy of Awareness, who polled 462 U.S. marketers in July about their social media business plan. Better customer engagement (78 percent) led revenue generation (51 percent) and an overall better customer experience (47 percent) as the social marketers’ leading objectives.

Social presence was rated as the number one method of measuring a brand’s effectiveness by 96 percent of marketers, ahead of website traffic (89 percent) and social mentions (84 percent), and 62 percent of marketers cited new customers as the top measure of revenue generation, with leads (60 percent) and sales (59 percent) rounding out the top three.

The report also noted that some 66 percent of marketers plan to increase their presence across social media platforms, 56 percent plan to post with greater frequency and half (50 percent) are looking to better integrate social media with their other marketing initiatives.

(Source: eMarketer, Awareness. Customer relationship image via Shutterstock.)