Rivalry Google, Facebook to be the top social media player

As Google works to make its Google+ social network a major competitor to market leader Facebook, the battle between the two could reach a critical point in 2012, analysts say. Facebook, the world's largest social network, and Google, the world's largest Internet company, are increasingly going head-to-head in a battle to be the top social media player and get the big advertising dollars that go with the position.

"The big moment will be Facebook's IPO," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. "This will define whether Facebook has the resources to hold off Google. A strong IPO would make Facebook a peer. And a more-focused Google could take Facebook out if the IPO fails. Google was responsible for the biggest news in social networking in 2011 with the June unveiling of Google+. Google's social network looked and functioned much like Facebook -- enabling users to post status updates, share links and upload photos. To date, Google+ hasn't hurt Facebook, which turned out to be a tough competitor against a product that has the backing of a company with strong clout and deep pockets.

"Google+ hasn't made much progress versus Facebook this year," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. "While no one expected Google+ to blow Facebook out of the water, I do think most watchers believed that Google+ would present a larger challenge. After a big introduction and mostly positive buzz, Google+ has seemed to fizzle a bit." "I think Facebook wins 2011," he added. "I'd say most observers would have predicted that Google and Google+ would put a big dent in Facebook by capturing a significant number of Facebook users. Facebook held onto their market share and even expanded it a bit."
"[For the next year], Google will integrate Google+ into every property it has, including the Android OS.

I used to find stuff via Google. According to the folks at Nielsen, Facebook trails only Google in the number of unique monthly visitors (137 million vs 153 million) but it’s killing Google in time spent on line. People spend about 16 percent of their time online just on Facebook – or more than they do on Yahoo, Google, AOL, and YouTube combined. Google recently announced that people share 1 billion items a day on G+ – or about one-fourth the number of items shared on Facebook, a number that’s doubling each year. Google knows this better than anyone. It seems weird to write about a company like Google -- which so thoroughly dominates search and Web advertising – as “falling behind.”