A number of top Web sites are missing the boat when it comes to social media - but Facebook, followed by Google, remains the preferred choice.
In a short Friday report released by BrightEdge of social adoption among top Web sites, the platform estimated that just 51 percent include a Twitter or a Facebook link on the site's front page. The survey examined the main home pages of the world's top 10,000 sites, it said.
"This is clearly a missed opportunity for the brands that own web properties that are not 'social aware',", the authors wrote.
BrightEdge examined its data in two ways: identifying the types of "basic links" to social sites that the world's top sites employed, and then examining which of those specific social tools they used.
The firm said that, within basic links, 47.4 percent of the world's top sites connected to Facebook (up from 47.2 percent a month before) while 41.8 percent of them linked to Twitter (from 41.4 percent a month before). The number of sites connecting to YouTube stayed roughly stable at 16.75 percent, as they did for LinkedIn, with 3.7 percent of the sites providing a link.
However, 4.5 percent of those sites also placed a Google "+1" link on their pages. "This could be as a result of the recent buzz around the lunch of Google Plus [Google+]," the report's authors concluded.
Many of the world's sites refused to go beyond basic links, however. The Facebook Like button remained the world's most popular, with 10.8 of the sites using it. The more sophisticated "Like" box, however, was less frequently added, with 6.1 percent installing it. And Facebook Connect and Facebook Recommendations were hardly used ,with 1.9 percent and 1.2 percent of sites, respectively, using it.
The world's top sites are also barely using Twitter, with just 2.1 percent of them employing a Twitter share button, and just 1.3 percent asking readers to instantly follow a author or other subject, via the Twitter "Instant Follow" button.