Google +1 Button More Used Than Twitter Buttons
An interesting report by BrightEdge revealed that while Facebook social sharing plugins are still on top, the Google +1 button has seen a huge rise in usage that places it above all Twitter buttons put together.
The study was carried out by BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform used by many major online companies.
They analyzed the home pages of the Web's top 10,000 websites, looking for social sharing features, specifically links to their social network profiles and social plugins.
From the analyzed batch, only 49% had any link to at least one social profile page.
The first chart (provided by BrightEdge) included on the top of this page shows that 47.4% of all websites have a front page link to their Facebook profile.
Twitter is second with 41.8%, YouTube is third with 16.75% and LinkedIn came fourth with 3.7%.
Expect this gap between the first two and the rest to widen, since Facebook and Twitter pages are more marketable and user-friendly than YouTube or LinkedIn profiles.
These last two often get linked from other specialized web pages like a video gallery or a recruitment page, but much more rarely from the home page.
The second category of social linking analyzed in the report was social plugins. This includes Facebook Like buttons, Facebook Like boxes, Facebook Connect, Facebook Recommendations, Twitter Follow buttons, Twitter Share buttons, Google +1 buttons and much more.
While the Facebook Like button is the most used social sharing plugin with 10.8% of all websites, Google +1, the latest addition to this group has sky-rocketed above all Twitter sharing buttons taken as one (second chart).
The Google +1 button is currently used by 4.5% of all 10,000 websites, while the Twitter Share button is used by only 2.1% and the Twitter Follow button by 1.3%.
Nevertheless, it came third behind the Facebook Like box, used on 6.1% of all top websites.
Expect the Google +1 button to gain more ground after the Google+ API launches, and Google+ rolls out of beta.
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