From my experience of talking to lots of charities about social media, I know that one of the hardest things they face is getting buy-in from senior management teams around their use of tools like Twitter or Facebook. As the measurement of success is often very hard, and there’s not exactly a wealth of case studies or stats surrounding the usage of these sites, proving the case for a new social media campaign or activity is not easy.

However, here’s where research like Universal McCann’s ‘Power to the People’ survey comes in handy. They have just released wave 4 of their global survey on social media usage, first run in September 2006.

For the latest version, “UM questioned 22,729 active internet users in 38 countries between November 2008 and March 2009 for Wave 4, making it the largest global analysis of social media usage”.

So if you want some social media stats to back up why you should spend more time on your charity’s Facebook fan page, this can help back up your arguments. I’ve picked out a few UK stats I think are of most interest, but I recommend you give the whole thing a read.

As an exmaple, it says that 64% of active UK internet users have created a profile on a social network (up from 60% in wave 3, and 27.4% in wave 2).

According to this, the rise in social networking hasn’t plateaued or started to decrease, it’s still growing. In fact, this is one of the report's main findings – which they call the “rationalisation of social media” – where instead of writing a blog on one site, keeping photos on another site, and then spending time on a social network, all of these activities are starting to take place in one location for many web users.

When asked “What do you do with your social networking profile?” the respondents gave a much wider range of activities than ever before, including a big increase in the number uploading photos (up to 76% from 45%), uploading videos (up to 33.1% from 21.1%), and installing applications/widgets that I want others to see (up to 24.4% from 18.5%) – good news for charities with applications and widgets on these networks. Certainly the JustGiving Facebook application has had just under 70,000 active users in the last month, so its usage is still going strong two years after it was launched.

Other key points from the UK market are that blog readership has decreased from 67% to 58%, and that video watchers are down from 86% to 79% too. Bad news if you’re starting a video blog then… or is it? Obviously any study of a general trend is just, well, general, so testing different approaches and measuring their effectiveness with your own audience is probably a good idea. In fact, the research also gives a ten step programme for successful social media. It’s pretty good advice:

And if you find this research interesting, you might also like this presentation on “What the fuck is social media: one year later” which gives even more amazing social media stats (like the fact that 3.6 billion photos have been uploaded on Flickr) in a straightforward no-nonsense manner. It's a follow up to the an incredibly popular presentation "What the fuck is social media" and they are both full of arguments to convince the staunchest cynic of the benefits of getting involved in social media.