The Google +1 button is now on more sites than the Twitter button

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 19 September 2011 in News, Google +1, Social Widgets, Twitter

The Google +1 button (not to be confused with the Google+ social network, although there is some connection) has been the fastest growing social widget in the last few weeks. On an average day, it is added on 440 websites out of the top 1 million sites. This makes it the fastest growing technology in all the categories of our surveys (JQuery is second).

Our technology change report shows that it is not really replacing other widgets, it is mainly added to the existing ones. Many sites use more than one social widget anyway.

We can see in the ranking breakdown report that Twitter is still ahead of Google +1 among the top 1,000 and top 10,000 sites, but at the current growth rates, this would just be a matter of weeks.

Little surprise that Google +1 is used much more on Google Servers (that would include Blogger sites, for example) than on sites running Microsoft IIS or IBM Server. Its usage is, however, only slightly higher on sites that also use Google Analytics as traffic analysis tool or Google Adsense as advertising network.

More surprising is the high usage rate on Russian, Chinese and Iranian sites, while its penetration rate on .edu and .gov sites is clearly below average.

The Google +1 button certainly has the potential to dethrone the Facebook social plugins in our survey, although that's still a long way to go. Having the "+1" appear in Google's search results (under certain circumstances) makes it quite irresistible for many webmasters. Whether this kind of Google's cross-product marketing is still "no evil", I guess that depends on your perspective.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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