From leading the way in fund-raising for Haiti to attempting to propel the song ‘Mrs Robinson’ to No 1, Facebook has become the global medium of choice for campaigns both serious and frivolous.

A THREE-DAY-OLD Facebook campaign has already raised what is believed to be a social networking site record of over $5 million to aid victims of the Haiti earthquake. The Earthquake Haiti page is adding some 75,000 new members each day, and apart from raising money is also carrying immediate and vital messages from relief agencies – as well as heartbreaking personal pleas from Haitians desperately asking about the whereabouts of immediate family members.

“Thank God for Facebook,” says the Port-au-Prince Salvation Army director, referring to the fact that, with phone lines down in the country, the site not only provided the first reportage and photographs of the natural disaster but is also leading the way in fundraising and coping with the aftermath.

From the deathly serious to the frivolously funny, Facebook campaigns are quickly becoming the first port of call for anyone with a point to make. The most obvious example of its massive influence and rapid turnaround capabilities, came at Christmas when a disgruntled British DJ managed to get Facebook users to send Rage Against the Machine to the top of the charts instead of the winner of last year’s The X Factor .

The fact that one individual could set in train an ultimately successful campaign that drew worldwide attention has encouraged others to focus on the site’s instant global contact facility – there are over 350 million active Facebook users worldwide.

Traffic to the microblogging service has increased 22-fold in the last year, according to the latest figures.

Twitter is now the 38th most-visited website in the UK, and the fifth most-visited social network, according to web analysts at Hitwise. It marks a seismic rise in the profile of the microblogging service, which just last year was the 969th most-visited website.

“Twitter has been the fastest growing major website in the UK over the last 12 months, and certainly the most talked about,” said Robin Goad, director of research at Hitwise. “The noticeable thing about Twitter’s growth is that the vast majority of it has occurred during 2009. Media coverage of the site has escalated significantly this year and high profile celebrity endorsements, by everyone from Stephen Fry to Ashton Kutcher, have come rolling in.

“If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications such as Twitterific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck were included, the numbers could be even higher.”

The Hitwise report found that Twitter is becoming a crucial hit-generator for other websites, with over half of all links contained within Twitter messages directing users through to sites such as social networks, blogs, news and entertainment sites. During May, Twitter was the 27th biggest source of traffic to media and newspaper websites in the UK.

“Twitter has proven to be a fantastic source of traffic for content driven sites, and the media companies with a strong presence on the service are using it to great effect, most notably Dell, which claims to have generated $3m in sales via Twitter."