Report: Facebook Like Button Most Used, Google +1 Button Surging

Today BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform, released a report on the adoption of social sharing plugins on websites and links to those sites. The findings show that about half of the top 10,000 websites have a link to their Facebook pages from their home page, 40% link to their Twitter pages and when it comes to like buttons, Google+ is now second place to Facebook.

Homepage Links To Social Sites

An interesting finding of the report was the overall number of links out to the various social sites.  The following chart showcases the percentages of sites that have a link to a  social destination on their home pages and compares July 2011 numbers vs. June 2011:

Facebook leads the way with 47.4% of the top 10,000 websites including a link to Facebook directly on their homepage.  The only social destination that dropped in July was YouTube, which was only slightly down by 0.02 points.

Like Buttons On Homepage

While the adoption of links on pages is rather high, the adoption of social plugins is a bit behind.  The two most popular social plugins belong to Facebook with the plugin types being the “like button” and the “like box” respectively.  Surprisingly, the stats show that Google’s +1 is more widely used than Twitter’s “share button” and is implemented at almost twice the rate.

Websites with Google +1 plugin integration are at 4.5%, beating the combined numbers of the “Twitter share” (2.1%) and “Twitter instant follow” (1.3%)  buttons:

Overall, Facebook is still the most prominent in terms of social links and social plugins, but Google’s +1 is gaining.  The most captivating stat of the report was just how little the Twitter plugins are being utilized currently even though over 40% of sites had a link to their Twitter profile.  View the full BrightEdge report for more information.