Google+ now the second most popular social network

Google+ has jumped up to the second most popular social network, according to Trendstream’s Global Web Index for Q4 2012. They put the social network slightly in-front of YouTube and Twitter, who are mostly tied.

“Google+, who despite being branded a failure or ghost town by large portions of the media, grew in terms of active usage by 27% to 343m users to become the number 2 social platform,” Global Web Index said. “Interestingly for Google, YouTube (not previously tracked by us as a social platform) comes in at number 3, demonstrating the immense opportunity of linking Google’s services through the G+ social layer. This is also a key indication of why Google+ integrated with the Google product set is so key to the future of search and the internet.”

Facebook seems to be doing very well, with Global Web Index saying that Facebook had 51% of the global internet population using the social network on a monthly basis.

“The fastest growing network in 2013 in terms of “Active Usage” (defined as “Used or contributed to in the past month”) was Twitter which grew 40% to 288m across our 31 markets (approximately 90% of global internet population). 21% of the global internet population now use Twitter actively on a monthly basis. This compares to 21% actively using YouTube, 25% actively using Google+ and a staggering 51% using Facebook on a monthly basis.”