The firm carried out an online survey of more than 1,000 companies and agencies to compile the report, which has been running for the last three years.

The results found that the number of companies using social network sites such as Twitter had almost doubled from 23% to 44%, but of these, only a quarter were using them to gather feedback from customers.

Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy, said: “Our research shows that companies which have processes and workflows to use social media to build customer dialogue, or who urge staff to use sites such as Twitter and Facebook to build customer dialogue, are still very much in the minority. However, we predict that in a year’s time significantly more companies will be embracing social media activity, whether for customer service, internal communications or for product development and innovation.”

However, Richard Sedley, customer engagement director at cScape, the survey’s sponsor, predicted that by next year the situation would have changed and more companies will be both using and investing in social media.