Google+ Already Driving More Traffic Than Some Established Social Media Sites

We have a new measurement of market share.  We are now tracking referrals from social media sites.  This measures the percentage of all web visitors that get referred from the major social media sites.

For our first article, Google+ has launched, and even in its early form, it is driving more referrals than some established players.  In July, Google+ already topped Mashable and Delicious.

Are People Tuning Out the Facebook Like Button?

When Facebook launched their updated Like button in February, there was a huge, immediate jump in the amount of referral traffic generated from facebook.com (as shown in the report's graph).  However, since then the percentage has been dropping rapidly.

Browser Wars

As we've mentioned before, Microsoft skipped XP support for Internet Explorer 9 in order to compete more effectively on Windows 7.  In July on Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9 hit 18.5% share worldwide and 24.8% in the United States.  There are indications that this strategy is working.  Although Internet Explorer lost usage share on XP, on Windows 7, Microsoft increased global usage share, going from 54.6% in June to 54.8% in July.  And in the U.S., Internet Explorer share on Windows 7 grew 0.6% to 68.1%.

Microsoft has been pushing Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7 as the best browsing experience on Windows 7 because of IE9's use of hardware acceleration and integration with the Windows 7 user interface.