Google+ has surpassed YouTube and Twitter, its other major competitors, to become the second most popular social networking site (SNS) globally in terms of active users, with 25 percent of the market share, behind only Facebook.
According to GlobalWebIndex, Facebook leads the pack with 50 percent of the market’s active users followed by Google+, while YouTube and Twitter follow closely with 21 percent.
Other social media sites such as Linkedin, Pinterest, MySpace and Tumblr all have less than 10 percent.
GlobalWebIndex puts Twitter ahead of Facebook and Google+ in terms of growth, having grown 40 percent, representing 21 percent of the entire global Internet population. The numbers are however limited to figures presented by the companies, which are “likely to have been manipulated”.
As per Google+, its statistics are so hidden that the site is not available in the StatCounter’s Top 7 Social Media sites chart for October to December 2012.
The new statistics mean that Facebook might have managed to shrug off some of the fatigue that seemed to be growing among its frequent users early last year, with the figures of active users growing by a massive 33 percent.
While mainstream global social networking sites experienced growth in the number of active users, local and country-specific sites witnessed declines, with Korean MeZDay, Chinese Kaixin and Tencent Weibo and German sites Studivz and Meinvz all shrinking by over 50 percent.
