Top 10 Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits [August 2012]

Priit Kallas

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Filed under: Facebook, Pinterest, Social Media, Surveys and stats

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Tags: Facebook, facebook market share, facebook market share 2012, Google, google plus, google+ market share, instagram, instagram market share, linkedin market share, market share, marketing charts, pinterest, pinterest app, pinterest market share, Social Media, social media market share, social media networking sites, Social media statistics, social network market share, social network market share 2012, social networking market share, social networking market share 2012, Social Networking Sites, social networking sites market share, social networks, social networks market share, top 10 social networking sites, top social networking sites, twitter market share, youtube market share

For a detailed view use interactive chart at the bottom of this post.

The big news is that Instagram cracked the top 10 list of market share of visits for the first time in August 2012. This is mostly due to visibility gained by Facebook deal as seen from the Alexa stats. (I will delete any comments mentioning the validity of Alexa stats, I know they suck).

Google+ jumped to 1.03 percent of market share of visits in August. This is the first time Google+ topped 1 percent mark. Google+ has been on the list for 10 months and it has not slipped once. It’s interesting to see how long will this trend continue.

Another big gainer, Pinterest, reached 1.08 percent of market share of visits. They have been moving up for 3 months now and this is the highest ever for the image sharing network. Some of that growth can be attributed to opening the registration for all users on August 8. I would expect the growth to continue. The most direct competitor for Pinterest is instagram and here’s a comparison of two image related social networking sites.

Twitter is slightly down to 2.03 percent in August. This ends the 10-month growth streak. However, the drop is so small that it’s hard to say if it’s an end of a trend or just a hiccup. The numbers in September will give a better insight into that.

Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn moved sideways in August. Of the three we should expect LinkedIn to gain ground in September.

And now, a moment of silence, please… MySpace, once dominant social networking site that has been in the top 10 list of market share of visits from the very beginning, dropped of the list.

Market Share of Visits [August 2012] for the top 5:

• Facebook 62.62% (+)
• Youtube 20.16% (-)
• Twitter 2.03% (-)
• Pinterest 1.08% (+)
• Google+ 1.03% (+)

About this chart

The chart below is in logarithmic scale so that the smaller sites wouldn’t just a single line around 1% of social network market share. Every month in the chart lists the top 10 sites of that time by the market share of visits. Please note that it is just a percentage and 30% in January 2009 is a lot less than 30% in September 2010. The gaps in the the lines mean that the site wasn’t in the top 10 at that time.

I used an interactive chart making software Tableau Public for this visualization. If you don’t see anything below please try reload. If all else fails then look at the image or download the chart in PDF format: Top 10 Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits.

Posted on: September 10, 2012