A little while back, Google rolled out the “ Search, plus your world” initiative. Ostensibly a way to tie your Google+ account into your search results, it also created a new column showing Google+ profiles that are somewhat relevant to your query. Search for movies and you’ll find the Google+ profiles for IMDB and for the actor Hugh Jackman. Search Facebook and you’ll grab Mark Zuckerberg’s absolutely barren Google+ profile. By prioritising its own social network over the likes Twitter and Facebook, some argued that Google’s results were biased. Twitter’s general counsel for policy, trust, safety, and long job titles, Alex Macgillivray, tweeted that the update was a “bad day for the internet”, as it would “warp” searches.

Twitter has complained about changes made by Google to integrate its social network Google+ into search results. The new feature, called Search plus Your World, will automatically push results from Google+ up the search rankings. Tweeting on the news, Twitter’s lawyer Alex Macgillivray described it as a “bad day for the internet”. Google is determined to push its social network in the face of continued rivalry with Facebook.The current changes were about even greater personalisation, it said. It already includes personal search history in its search algorithms.

With Google+ and Twitter rolling out updates like crazy in the last week, it’s a good time to compare growth of individual fan communities of the top brands on these social networking platforms. When we work with brands and media companies from all around the world, and a question we get asked a lot is: ‘which platforms should we focus on?’ The answer can vary for brands and media companies… The answer was quite clear for us, but until now we were not backing it with a good numbers visualization. We changed that. If you look at the infographics below, you will see the comparison of the Top 40 brands across different social media platforms. We looked at several aspects: