Social Climber

What social platform do you use? What you use, and where you use it, says a lot about you - and especially about where you live.

Facebook is the leading social network, and by quite some distance, according to the latest research by GlobalWebIndex. It reveals that a whopping 83 per cent of internet users around the world aged 16 to 64 now have a Facebook account, a figure that's still growing. Lining up behind Facebook are Google+, YouTube and Twitter, although those figures hide some massive regional differences.

Twitter is the biggest social media platform in Japan, as of this year, while Google+ is growing fast in the developing world. Meanwhile, WhatsApp is used by over half of the online populations of Hong Kong, South Africa, Malaysia and Singapore - and it's the most used app in Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa. However, the GWI data reveals that Instagram is the fastest rising social platform overall, with a 25 per cent increase in active user numbers in the last six months.

No wonder, then, that Facebook now owns both WhatsApp and Instagram. It's part of Facebook's aggressive intention to dominate the mobile web sphere, which is destined to become the de facto online experience for most of us - if it isn't already.

"Facebook already has the lion's share of all social logins, accounting for 53 per cent globally," says Patrick Salyer, CEO of US-based social data company Gigya.

"Mobile logins are even higher, accounting for 62 per cent globally, showing a clear dominance in the mobile space."

Although Google is second to Facebook, it lags behind with just a 26 per cent share, while 87 per cent of mobile internet users visit it each month. Facebook gets 10 per cent fewer views.

The social media platform's increasing domination of the mobile web has got analysts wondering whether it could soon overtake Google as the main arbiter of the online experience.