More professionals are using social media for business purposes, but companies have yet to grasp the best way to measure return on investment (ROI).

A Sept. 22 report from eMarketer shows that 86 percent of professionals worldwide are using social media technology, such as Twitter and Facebook, for business purposes.

Of the respondents, 57 percent used social media for marketing, 39 percent for internal collaboration and learning, 29 percent for customer service and support, and 25 percent for sales. (See the full breakdown)

According to the survey, rather than hiring someone new and committing budget dollars for social media, 57 percent of respondents reported devoting existing employees to social media initiatives. However, 40 percent of respondents were committing budget dollars for social media.

Despite the increase in adoption of social media, few companies measure their return on investment (ROI) for their social media programs. Only 16 percent of respondents said they measure ROI, leaving 84 percent in the dark.

The reason, according to the report, could be that measuring social media marketing can be difficult. The report offered a suggestion of using a combination of hard and soft ROI metrics and said marketers can assign dollar values to soft metrics such as number of followers or can distribute a coupon across a platform and measure its success.

The prevalence of social media has led Microsoft to join the bandwagon. Microsoft unveiled a new social media monitoring product called “Looking Glass” on Tuesday. The product, although just a prototype that will only be available to a few companies in the short term, according to ClickZ.com, will help companies better aggregate the constant chatter of their customers across social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The hope is to allow companies to be better positioned to respond to that chatter.

Further, Microsoft expects the program to be interwoven with other business elements such as customer databases, CRM centers and sales data, according to the ClickZ.com report.

The product is one of the first developed by a major software maker to directly address social media in this fashion.