Big banks are clearly struggling with Twitter, as highlighted by The New York Times this week. Just a cursory look at, for example, Bank of America’s Twitter help line shows the challenge — and opportunities — the banks face in social media.

But are all financial institutions struggling with social media?

Apparently, no. Hats off to our own fellow member Jim Marous for a valuable study on bank marketing released today, which shows, among many interesting data points, that credit unions are spanking the banks in social media. Jim, in his analysis, highlighted the challenges FIs face today:

All classes of organizations indicated the expectation of a resource constraint challenge in 2012 (despite equal or higher budgets), yet that is where the similarities end between banks and credit unions. Banks indicated a significantly higher challenge due to the lack of trust in the banking industry, which credit unions have used to their advantage in the second half of 2011 and into this year. Banks also are much more challenged by the presence of silos within the organization as well as by regulatory and compliance issues that credit union marketers indicated. Interestingly, non-community banks seem to have it easier when it comes to getting employee support for programs initiated.

Those are substantial challenges, indeed. But what I found more interesting was just how far ahead credit unions in social media are.

The graph above shows the lead credit unions have. Credit unions are more avid users of YouTube, Google+, Foursquare, and Twitter — and, most significantly and by a wide margin, Facebook, the mother of all social networking services. True, banks are ahead in blogs and LinkedIn, but by a narrow margin. And if you consider the “not yet, but plan to” data, credit unions are intent to reverse even those small leads.

I am not going to say there is any profound surprise in this data, but it is interesting to see the hard numbers that prove out the expectations. What is surprising, however, is just how greatly community banks lag credit unions. If anything, community banks should have the same posture of credit unions when it comes to social media, which, after all, fosters, uh, community. Not so, and that has got to change in my view. Credit unions are picking up share vs. banks precisely because they are more expeditiously tapping into communities. Community banks should at least do the same.