The Irresistible Rise Of Google+

Social Media Insights is a daily newsletter from Business Insider that collects and delivers the top social media news first thing every morning. You can sign up to receive Social Media Insights here or at the bottom of this post.

---

Google+ Integration Allows Domination (Social Media Today)
Google+ recently overtook Twitter in the list of social platforms with the most active users, despite the latter officially winning the crown for fastest growing network for 2012. Twenty five percent of the global Internet population actively use Google+ in one way or another, compared to the 21 percent on Twitter. The key to Google+ is its deep integration with most other Google products, such as Search, Gmail, Calendar, Drive and Picasa. Google has built a social platform which is woven tightly with our day-to-day experience of the Internet. Read >>

The Irresistible Rise Of Google+ (Attwood Digital via Bit Rebels)
Google+ has created a few interesting traffic generating features, and Google authorship is one of them. Google authorship is a way to help search engine users find content from people they know or want to connect with. Basically what you do is personalize the visual search engine result and claim it as your own. And if you want traffic, you need to be where the traffic is generated. Click here for the full infograph. Read >>

Facebook Rumored To Reveal The Facebook Phone (TechCrunch)
Facebook invited press to an event at its headquarters on April 4th to "Come See Our New Home On Android." Sources tell TechCrunch it will be a modified version of the Android operating system with deep native Facebook functionality on the homescreen that may live on an HTC handset. The evidence aligns to say this is the Facebook Phone announcement people have been speculating about for years. Read >>

Majority Of Facebook Engagement Is In The First Minutes (VentureBeat)
Crunching the numbers on tens of millions of social data points, hundreds of thousands of Facebook pages, and 8,500 of the world’s top brands on Facebook, has taught Optimal Social a few things about virality.

"About half of your engagement is in the first 60 minutes," Optimal’s CEO Rob Leathern told me. "And about three quarters is within the first 180 minutes. That pattern is quite consistent." Read >>

Things You Learn When Deleting Your Facebook Account (USA TODAY)
Kendra Benner, a USA TODAY college contributor, recently deleted her Facebook account. Here's what she learned:

1. It's possible to go without it
2. Some of the information posted on Facebook is really valuable
3. Social media made me feel like I could concentrate on multiple things at once
4. Facebook sometimes taints a person's sense of mystery
5. You can be technologically savvy without being social-networking savvy
6. Social media had given me an artificial sense of connection
7. Facebook posts sometimes hurt my friends' relationships
8. Birthdays are more special
9. Limiting your Facebook use little by little is better than trying to quit entirely

She was one of the last people in her high school to get a Facebook account, but she deleted it two years later because it became so distracting. Read >>

The Rise Of Social Media Apps (Baynote via Mediabistro)
Did you know that the time spent using social media apps on mobile devices grew by an incredible 387 percent between December 2011 and December 2012? Indeed, use of social media mobile software (such as the official Facebook and Twitter clients) led all types of apps in overall usage growth, pushing media/entertainment (+268 percent) and shopping (+247 percent) apps into second and third place respectively. Overall, consumers spent 132 percent more time using all apps year-on-year. This infographic takes a closer look at this data and the impact that these apps are making in retail commerce. Read >>

Social Behavior: The Big Game (iAcquire via Social Media Today)
iAcquire and Survey Monkey recently combined forces to create a study on social behavior. The March Madness-themed infographic uncovers key information on search privacy concerns, social influence, efficacy of images in search results, social sharing behavior, and social preferences by social network and demographic. Read >>