Which social networks should you focus on in 2012?

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Posted 13 January 2012 09:41am by Jan Rezab with 8 comments

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With Google+ and Twitter rolling out updates like crazy in the last week, it's a good time to compare growth of individual fan communities of the top brands on these social networking platforms.

When we work with brands and media companies from all around the world, and a question we get asked a lot is: 'which platforms should we focus on?'

The answer can vary for brands and media companies...

The answer was quite clear for us, but until now we were not backing it with a good numbers visualization. We changed that.

If you look at the infographics below, you will see the comparison of the Top 40 brands across different social media platforms. We looked at several aspects:

1. Total fans

The interesting thing to watch here is the Facebook vs. Twitter, as Google+ is in general simply too small. The interesting piece here is, how much Twitter really impacts media.

The difference is huge, and with Retweets being a bigger of a thing then "Shares and likes", we can probably say that Twitter is at least as important of a tool for media companies as Facebook is. We will be clarifying those numbers soon.

2. Growth of fans

We have taken the overall growth of fans in about a month, and again we looked at the trio. Now this part got really interesting: Brands on Google+ are growing faster than brands on Twitter.

This is shocking, and even though Google+ is at its beginning, it will definitely continue to grow (also supported by its largely controversial "Google plus your world").

In the media world, we can see that the difference of growth of Facebook and Twitter media groups is not very different, so this is also quite interesting.

3. Overall top 

In the third section, you will see the individual Top 10 brands and media companies on these different platforms, and you can state a couple facts:

• Google+ pages are largely driven by those that go and support it, and to us it currently seems like a lot of advertised traffic that does stop over some time, no organic growth is there.
• Twitter doesn't seem like a natural platform for brands, brands have to push it to really get up there.
• Facebook seems like a natural platform for brands, and also works for media companies.

Summary

In this time and world, you have to focus on all platforms, thats obvious. You should definitely be present on all platforms regardless, but focus on those bringing you good results.

For media companies, this is Facebook and Twitter for now, with a more passive Google+ presence.

For brands, this is Facebook, and it seems like Google+ is the next place to be, but it's still far behind Facebook (see first chart).

Infographic source: Socialbakers