Yesterday we looked at how discussion about the #RoyalBaby on Twitter had reached such a frenzy that it had even usurped tweets sent to and about the network’s most popular user, Justin Bieber.

Indeed, since the birth of the baby, and the reveal about the gender (it’s a boy, btw – you’re welcome), Bieber has been left even further in its dust. But which country has been most excited about the news?

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Unless you’ve spent most of the day trapped under something heavy, you’ve probably heard that the Duchess of Cambridge is in labour. Catherine and William arrived at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, west London, at 6am GMT this morning, and the royal push is now well underway.

The couple have not announced the sex of the baby-to-be, but that hasn’t stopped Twitter speculating. Indeed, mentions of the royal baby have reached such a fever pitch over the past 24 hours that they’re even outpacing tweets sent to the micro-blogging social network’s reigning l’enfant terrible, Justin Bieber.

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Using social media platforms to both login to websites and share content has become a web standard and, increasingly, something that pretty much all of us do on a regular basis.

But which social networks are leading the way? New data from Gigya has revealed that while Facebook continues to dominate, it faces significant competition from Twitter in the social sharing space, where Google+ hardly registers at all.

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How many people do you follow on Twitter? Fifty? A couple of hundred? A few thousand, maybe?

More?

It’s totally your choice, of course, but one thing that’s true is that as you follow more and more people Twitter becomes exponentially harder to manage.

Indeed, it’s my personal belief that nobody needs to follow more than a few hundred accounts. They have to be the right accounts, of course – and as always, that’s right for you – but if you’re selective and prune your network regularly, you can get everything you need from less than 500 follows. Sometimes, a lot less. And if your follows number get much higher than that, certainly into the thousands, Twitter can easily become a bit of a mess.

So: can you just imagine what it looks like if you’re following more than a million people?

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@YouTube maintains its top spot as the premier brand on Twitter, with its more than 30 million followers placing it first ahead of @Instagram and even @Twitter itself.

Yep. The official @Twitter account is only the third most-followed brand on its own social platform, and twelfth amongst all profiles, with a whisker over 21 million followers. However, combined with @twitter_es, the official Spanish Twitter profile, and its 12.6 million followers, it would rank first overall.

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We’ve been saying that it’s been on the cards for a while, but long-term Twitter numero uno Lady Gaga, who was the most-followed user on the micro-blogging social network for more than two years, has fallen to third place amongst the platform’s elite, being caught and passed by Katy Perry.

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Did you know that each and every minute of the day, 100,000 tweets are sent, 684,478 pieces of content are shared on Facebook and 3,600 photos are published on Instagram?

Think that’s all? Far from it. Every 60 seconds 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, 47,000 apps are downloaded from the App Store and an amazing two million search queries are made on Google.

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Did you know that 27 percent of the total time spent online is now dedicated to social networking?

What if I told you that 84 percent of online shoppers use social media sites, that social media produces almost double the leads of trade shows, telemarketing, direct mail and cost per click (CPC) marketing, or that social media lead conversion rates are 13 percent higher than the average?

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Unless you’ve been trapped under something very heavy for the past 24 hours, you’re no doubt well aware that tennis player Andy Murray has become the first British winner of the Wimbledon men’s singles title for 77 years, with his straight sets victory over world number one Novak Djokovic, which fittingly took place on 7/7 (July 7th), very much rewriting the sporting history books.

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Here’s your statistic of the day: in just five years, the amount of digital information created and shared globally has grown 900 percent to almost 2 zettabytes.

I know what you’re thinking – what in blue blazes is a “zettabyte”? Brace yourself: it’s two trillion gigabytes.

Two trillion.

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