New report analyses state of social media among Australian non-profits

June 28, 2012 - PRLog -- There is enormous pressure on businesses and non-profits to have a 'social media strategy' – a term often used as a euphemism for nothing more than setting up a basic Facebook page. But very few institutions rely on or carry out concrete research to assess relevance and viability before jumping onto the social media bandwagon.

Scope

Conducted by Wirth Consulting over several months, the State of Social Media Use in Australian Non-Profits report looks at 4 areas – extent of social media use by Australia's non-profit sector, most popular social media technologies, method of engagement used by non-profits in social media and the top non-profit social media users in Australia.

Online social media technologies now number in the thousands. The report focuses on nine of the most widely used social media platforms. It looks at more than 600 non-profits with the bulk (65 percent) drawn from the health and human services subsector.

Information was primarily collected from secondary data repositories and examined different facets of the social media experience including page customization, posting frequency and number of connections (fans, followers or friends).

Key Findings

About 97% of the institutions analysed had a website. The report lists the top 19 non-profit institutions in the country in terms of social media utilization.

The data shows Facebook had roughly 11 million local users while Twitter.com sees 1.8 million unique visitors in Australia as at April 2012. For LinkedIn, the number of local users over the same period stood at 2 million.

These are among the key highlights of the report some of whose findings are probably a bit surprising. Take for instance the fact that non-profits with annual budgets of more than $5,000,000 and below $100,000 were more likely to use social media than those that fell in the $100,000 - $250,000 bracket. Non-profits with a larger staff count (1000 or more) were less likely to have an active blog.

Visit www.wirthconsulting.com.au or contact Bianca on media@wirthconsulting.com.au for more information on the upcoming report launch.