Irish Social Web – Facebook Leads and Google Lags

Over 21% of active Irish websites have a link to Facebook. Only 1.33% of active Irish websites link to plus.google.com. Between Facebook and Google Plus are Twitter, Youtube and LinkedIn. This data is based on the monthly webusage survey that HosterStats runs on the Irish web. The survey covers over 325K Irish and Irish hosted websites and classifies how each site is used. The index page for each detected Irish website is checked and the website’s use is categorised using a set of custom search engine algorithms.

Removing the holding page sites, PPC parked sites, compromised sites, redirected sites produces a more accurate view of the Irish Social Web as it applies to Irish websites.

Facebook: 21.21%
Twitter: 15.19%
Youtube: 5.91%
LinkedIn: 4.10%
Google+: 1.33%

May 2013 Irish Webusage Survey – HosterStats.com

In terms of all surveyed sites, the percentages for the top Social Media sites are:

Facebook: 11.28%
Twitter : 8.08%
Youtube: 3.14%
Linkedin: 2.18%
Google+: 0.71%

Some of the Facebook links are from the “Like This” features but there is a considerable number of businesses using Facebook pages as a part of their website marketing. It provides a more human kind of interaction than e-mail.

Twitter also seems to be an important tool for webmasters and business owners as does Youtube. LinkedIn is also there. But what is really surprising is that Google+ is being beaten by all of these sites. Either Irish webmasters aren’t interested in linking back to plus.google.com or there is no compelling reason for them to do so. For a business owner, that compelling reason is the market and the bulk of the market, these days, seems to be on Facebook. Or perhaps SEOs don’t consider G+ to be as important as Facebook?