For years, the social media landscape has remained largely unchanged. Sure, you have things like Pinterest and Instagram popping up, but the big things for business have consistently been Marketing with Twitter and Facebook. Google+ was designed to be the Facebook killer, but it hasn’t accomplished that, not by a long-shot. What Google’s social network HAS done, just this week, is take one step up the podium.

The new Global Web Index results are out, and Google+ has more users than Twitter. Not surprisingly, both networks are still far, far behind Facebook. The numbers break down like this: Twitter has 21% of global internet users using their service, Google+ has 25%, and Facebook has a mighty 51%.

What does this mean for your marketing? Honestly, not a lot. You should be sure you have your Google+ page set up, and that your local listing is accurate, but there just isn’t a vibrant community of real users on the service. The numbers are deceptive due to Google’s integrated services model, where you need a Google+ account to do other things on the web. The Google+ network itself is actually still bordering on a ghost-town, especially when compared to the furious activity on both Facebook and Twitter.

Google does have plans to change this in the future. YouTube is currently the third largest network, tied with Twitter. It’s been suggested that Google will make a Google+ account mandatory for anyone who wants to use YouTube. If they actually enforce that, you can bet Google+ will suddenly be a real rival to Facebook in terms of sheer user volume, if not in user activity.

Original article about Social Media Marketing can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "Google+ Slides into Second Place!" by Dan Hinds.