A study on the average donations made by donors to pages on the JustGiving website has found that Twitter users are the most generous of all social media users, but account for just a fraction of traffic compared to Facebook, which has become a massively important source for fundraising online.

JustGiving has revealed that the average donation of a user coming from Twitter is £30.26, which compares to £28.77 on YouTube, £25.21 on LnkedIn and just £18.33 on Facebook.

Only Google+ users finished below Facebook, donating £17.77 on average.

Facebook, however, accounts for an incredible 97 percent of all visits to JustGiving from social media sites, with Twitter making up just 1 percent of that tally.

In September, visits from Facebook made up 27 percent of all traffic to JustGiving pages, which represented a year-on-year increase of some 130 percent, and the donation platform expects this to rise to 50 percent by 2015.

“Third sector organizations should ignore social media at their peril,” said Elizabeth Kessick, head of insight at JustGiving. “This data shows that social giving is an increasingly important driver for donations. The good news is that it’s also a very cost-effective way for charities to canvass for support.”

(Source: JustGiving. Top image credit: EugenP via Shutterstock.)