The social networking segment has seen intense competition over the months with the social networking giants frequently rolling out updates and new features to keep user engagement up. The competition is by and large dominated by Facebook but other sites are catching up as well. And much to everyone's surprise, Google+ has moved to the second spot for social platforms while YouTube ranks third, ahead of Twitter, according to Trendstream’s Global Web Index for Q4 2012.

According to the report, Facebook's active user count was around 693 million by 2012-end whereas Google+ had some 343 million users. Facebook clearly leads the race with a huge margin while Google+ has quite a bit of catching up to do in the near future. However, Google's social networking site has become popular enough to move past Twitter and Twitter.

“Data collected in GWI.8 (Q4 2012) demonstrates the continued shift in usage from localised social platforms to global ones with huge growth for Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. The fastest growing network in 2013 in terms of 'Active Usage' (defined as 'Used or contributed to in the past month') was Twitter which grew 40 percent to 288m across our 31 markets (approximately 90 percent of global internet population). 21 percent of the global internet population now use Twitter actively on a monthly basis. This compares to 21% actively using YouTube, 25 percent actively using Google+ and a staggering 51percent using Facebook on a monthly basis,” says the report.