Twitter Beats Facebook (And Everyone Else) As The Most Popular Social Network Of 2011 [STUDY]

Twitter completely dominated 2011 – on a month-by-month basis it consistently edged out Facebook as the most talked about social platform, with Facebook winning only two months in the year. Both of these channels ruled media coverage of social networking in 2011, with all the other ‘major’ social networks hardly being mentioned at all.

According to data from Highbeam Research, Twitter was discussed in about 50 percent of all media coverage of social networks throughout 2011. Facebook received about 45 percent of all coverage, edging out Twitter in February and April, ahead of third-placed LinkedIn (3.33 percent).

MySpace (1.3 percent) and FourSquare (0.71 percent) rounded out the pack. Google+ wasn’t mentioned in the report.

While Facebook dwarfs Twitter in sheer size, Twitter has always been a mainstream media darling. The continued influx of celebrities, plus Twitter’s growing stature as the place for breaking news, as well as being an on-the-spot source of news itself, effectively guarantees an onslaught of column inches.

Facebook has attempted to ready this balance with new features this year, including the site’s much-hyped Subscribe feature, but if I were a betting man I would suspect that Twitter will widen this gap over the next twelve months, and look for the network to peg more than 50 percent of media coverage in 2012.

(Source: Highbeam Research.)