Britney Spears has become the first person to hit six million fans on Google+ and her posts are generating hundreds of comments each time. Pop queen rival Lady Gaga is just behind on 5.9 million and closing fast, according to social media tracker Starcount.com.

Britney has added more than five million followers on Google’s social network in the last 16 months, but while the growth is impressive it is still dwarfed by the kind of numbers the same stars are racking up on Facebook and Twitter. Read More »

Ipsos Mori has released its quarterly ‘tech tracker’ report for the first quarter of 2013, and found that now 50% of British adults access social networks, with nearly half of all adults using Facebook in the last 3 months.

Tellingly, more than half of adults access social networks via a smartphone, showing how important it is for networks to perfect their mobile offering and revenue streams.

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UPDATE – Just a small update on the Google Reader story from yesterday after Buzzfeed published this very telling graph below. It appears to show that Google Reader drives far more traffic than Google’s social platform Google+.

Surely there is some irony at play here? We are talking about two Google services here. One being much loved and useful and the other being Google+, which is a service that Google is pushing as hard as it can and encouraging us all to use. Read More »

If 2011 and 2012 were about first experimenting and then putting a social-media strategy into play, this year has to be about starting to think what is working and what is not. It is also about realising that you don’t have to try everything, and, more to the point, that you can’t do everything, as that brings with it another set of problems. Read More »

Continuing the series of data snapshots for social, Digital and mobile usage worldwide, here are the latest numbers for the different regions around the world. All indicators show significant growth since last year’s worldwide report, with mobile clearly the driving force for all aspects of our connected lives. It follows The Wall’s report earlier this week that picked up on the tremendous growth of social media in Brazil, which is becoming the focus for many. Read More »

Last night, with my feet up watching TV, I was amazed at the number of ads I saw for information search and listing-type websites. Within two commercial breaks, I counted at least four; Hotels.com, Trivago, Kayak and 118 118. For me this really hit home how the modern psychology of online purchasing, especially for big ticket items and leisure activities, is changing. Not just satisfied with finding out where we can obtain a R186 signal box, or fishing advice from JR Hartley, we now want that instantaneous, great value deal, in addition to seeking advice and advocacy from others through the myriad of reviews and rating calculations that these sites provide. Read More »

Something appears to be happening around Google’s Google+ at least this is what some new numbers tell us from GlobalWebIndex. It says Google+ has 343 million active users which makes it the second largest social network globally. That is likely surprise some, if not many as it is still difficult to see how much of this activity is because Google pushes its network so hard to anyone who has a Google profile.

Essentially Google+ has gone, according to these numbers, from being a ghost town to being the new number two social network. Better still GWI has YouTube as its third largest social network. Read More »

One of the continued growth areas that is often overlooked when it comes to the social web are blogs. It is a market that continues to grow at a rapid pace even if it is in part fuelled by pictures of cats. The success of Tumblr as well as the continued growth of platforms like Word Press, Google+ and Blogger shows no signs of letting up.  By the end of 2011, NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, tracked over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million five years earlier. Read More »

Interesting post on the Harvard Business Review blog that makes the case for not spreading yourself too thin when it comes to social media. While some argue that brands need to keep up and be represented on a variety of social platforms in practice this can prove challenging. Even if you consider only the biggest social networks that still means you having a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram. You could add Foursquare to that — some do seem to think that it will have a good year. Read More »

For the past week or so the technology press has been widely speculating about an announcement from Facebook, expected this afternoon at its Menlo Park headquarters. Will it be the rumoured and oft denied phone? Or a new ad platform or search engine? Reports are now saying it is the latter and expect Facebook to launch its own search engine. Read More »