Facebook's Still Growing

Recently there have been reports that not only has Twitter use peaked, but it's even beginning to fall, with active users dropping from 330 million down close to 200 million.

That's a good example of what typically happens with social networks, where they're hot for a few years and then replaced with something newer and hipper.

The exception so far is Facebook, which continues to grow despite predictions that its use plateaued long ago. Indeed, it's active users are now up to 1.59 billion, and incredibly, still growing.

Facebook shared the following statistics regarding it's growth (especially in advertising) in an email to SocialTimes:

• There are more than 43 billion connections between people and businesses on the social network.

• Southeast Asia is the fastest-growing region, and the top five countries in terms of year-over-year growth were the U.S., Brazil, the U.K., Italy and Australia.

• 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook per day.

• There are 1 billion users on Facebook Groups.

• 80 million users on Facebook Lite.

• 500 million users on Events and 123 million events were created in 2015.

• More than 1 million advertisers on Facebook are creating ads via mobile devices.

• More than 20 million active pages are using the social network’s Pages application.

• More than 70 percent of Facebook’s 3 million-plus advertisers are outside of the U.S.

• More than 50 million small and midsized businesses are currently using Facebook pages, and more than 80 percent of the social network’s users in the U.S. are connected to SMBs. More than 2.5 billion comments are posted on those pages each month.

• The top three verticals building Facebook pages are services, local commerce and e-commerce.

You may find that more of your fans are currently on other platforms, but ignore Facebook at your own peril.

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The Reality Of Using Google Plus For Promotion

There have been conflicting reports as to whether its worth the time to bother with Google+ when it comes to promoting your project. On one hand, the network has 2.2 billion profiles, of which Google says 500,000 are active per month.

That still pales in comparison to Facebook, with its 1.2 billion active users, but it's still ahead of Twitter, which has about 300 million.

But the Google+ user numbers are deceptive since you automatically are signed up to it if you have a gmail or YouTube account. Many people choose to ignore G+ entirely and just use the Google service they need at the moment, so many of those accounts lay dormant.

So is G+ worth spending the time on or not?

Stone Temple Consulting wanted to find out, so they randomly selected over 500,000 G+ profiles and analyzed how active they were. What they found was that only about 10% were active users in some sense of the word, with 90.1% containing actually no content at all.

Extrapolated out across the 2.2 billion user profiles, that means there were only 212 million active users. But after further looking at those "active" users, it was determined that only 50 million of those users had posted more than 5 times. An analysis of those users found that only about half of those posted in the last 30 days and only 8 million had posted over 50 times.

For such a reportedly huge network, Google+ doesn't have a commensurate amount of activity. Some of the activity that it does have is artificial in that YouTube upload notifications and comments and profile picture changes are automatically posted, but real live active users are far fewer than believed.

That said, if you know that's where your fans are, then that's where you should be as well. Google+ still has one of the best communication apps anywhere in Hangouts, which alone is worth spending time on the platform.

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Twitter Updates It's Homepage For Those Not Signed In

New Twitter Homepage Categories

Twitter is getting a somewhat bad rap because it's user numbers seem to have flattened out at around 280 million, but it turns out that active users aren't the only ones on the service.

More than 500 million people check out Twitter every month who aren't signed in, and more than 125 million of come through the Twitter.com homepage.

That's one of the reasons why the network has updated its main landing page to cater to those not signed in.

Now new visitors will see a collection of curated timelines that show off the most popular parts of the Twitterverse, with choices such as pop artists, cute animals, space news, tech blogs & reporters, business news, and actors, among others.

The reason behind the change is two-fold. First, it makes it easier to check out real-time news and conversations without needing an account or signing in. Second, it now can also serve up ads to those people to make additional revenue.

Of course, if Twitter can convert just a fraction of these visitors to active users it could finally get around the user plateau that it seems to have encountered. And it would also help if it found a way to show Wall Street that there's more to user numbers than those that are actively signed-in.

For the musician this is all good news. The fact that there are more people viewing the service than the numbers suggest means that it's not yet time to bail on the network like many have suggested. Twitter is still an especially powerful tool for an artist or band.

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Google+ Is Now #2

It was only a matter of time, but Google+ is now the second most used social network world-wide, according to a study of network activity in December by Trendstream. While Facebook had 693 active users, Google+ followed with 343 million. YouTube was third with 280 million.

But YouTube is owned by Google, right? You can make a case that we could combine the numbers for Google+ and YouTube, but that would still give you only 623 million, a good 70 million short of Facebook. That said, don't forget that there's been a huge swing to online work tools like Google Docs, which might make up the difference.

The problem with the Google numbers is that although everything is listed as active usage, in many cases people are interacting with Google and being listed as active without even knowing it. When you're interacting with a YouTube video, you're being listed as part of the social network, for instance. Is watching a video an active or passive pursuit? It depends upon how you look at it, or measure it.

Then again, it's difficult to be sure what constitutes an active user on Facebook or any other network either. If you have Facebook on an open tab of your browser all day, does that constitute as active? That's why we shouldn't get all that wrapped up in the number details of any study, but instead just look at the overall trend. That means that Facebook is still king of the hill, but Google+ now can easily claim #2.

You can find some great additional info in an article at Forbes.

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Facebook Loses Active Users

It's been evident that the number of unique visitors on Facebook was leveling off in recent months, but now comes evidence of a significant decline. Via an article on Hypebot, the site analyst company ComScore has determined that the number of unique visitors to Facebook have declined by 4.8% in the last six months!

This is pretty substantial in that Facebook was counting on its subscribers to rise a bit in the US rather than dropping, in order to support its recent IPO and subsequent investors. It's true that its more likely that the company will gain users in other parts of the world (in Asia in particular) as the US market seems somewhat saturated, but a decline of almost 5% is really unexpected.

So what's the reason for the decline? Are the users tiring of the Facebook experience? Do they hate the redesign (especially Timeline)? Are they using another social network instead? Are they still using the network but not loggin in? What do you think?

For the record, Facebook claimed that it has over 900 million "active" users in their last quarterly report. It'll be interesting to see what the next quarter report looks like.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.