As noted in a recent marketing report, the days of social media as an optional marketing channel are over. But marketers appear to be wrestling with a number of issues around social media, including how to best use social media to align with consumer preferences.

A survey earlier this year of more than 2,000 social marketers was designed to uncover how these marketers approach the structure, goals and content of their social media efforts. Survata conducted the survey for Sprout Social, and the results and report on the findings is available here.

According to the report, social media marketers aren't prioritizing the types of content that consumers want. Among the U.S. population, consumers are most likely to want – a popular term in marketing today – value. The Survata survey found that marketers prioritize posts that tell a story (58 percent), yet just a little over one-third (37 percent) of Internet users said this is the type of content they want to see.

Consumers indicated that they want to see social media posts about potential savings in their news feeds, with 72 percent putting a priority on posts about discounts and deals. Yet, only 18 percent of marketers said they prioritize that kind of content.

At the same, the traditional approach of driving the return on investment for social media via a focus on linking the posts directly to sales doesn’t appear to reflect where social marketers are focused, according to Sprout Social’s report. “Eighty percent of social marketers say increasing brand awareness is their primary goal on social, and another 80 percent say their key strategy is increasing engagement across their social channels,” the report notes. “In fact, only 14 percent of marketers say they are able to quantify the revenue from social. Looking at social primarily through the sales lens breeds an overly microscopic perspective.”