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

Priit Kallas

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

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

Pinterest is moving sideways and its market share of visits went down a bit from 1.00 in February to 0.94% in March 2012. This is due to the fact that Facebook, Twitter and Youtube moved slightly up. With this result Pinterest is 5th on the list. Compete.com data for February shows massive growth with more than 16 million unique visitors (Compete.com data lags about one month). However, that is a little below my estimate of 20 million unique visitors for February 2012. Maybe Pinterest is finally reaching a plateau?

Two social networking sites that increased their market share in February were Twitter and Google+. Twitter reached 1.64% market share in March 2012. This is the highest figure for them in almost 3 years and follows 6 months of solid growth. If this trend continues then April would be the best month for Twitter, ever.

Google+ is up, too from 0.47% in February to 0.55% in March. There still seems to be some life in the Google’s attempt at social networking. By integrating Google+ with all their other services Google might pull this off and manage to get all the social data they need to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

LinkedIn went down from 0.80 percent to 0.77 percent in March 2012. I still think LinkedIn will continue its growth and pass 1 percent mark some time in the next 6 months. There is a solid user base for professional social networking.

Percentages for the big players in March:

• Facebook 63.18%
• Youtube 20.16%
• Twitter 1.64%

Let us know in the comments what will happen with Pinterest and Google+ in 2012.

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: April 10, 2012