Facebook has seen a six per cent decline in monthly active users over the past six months, according to a Q2 report from GlobalWebIndex (GWI).

In fact, of the top 10 social networks, only three saw growth in active users over this period: Instagram (up 25 per cent), Tumblr (up 22 per cent) and Pinterest (up seven per cent).

Nevertheless, Facebook remains by far the biggest social network globally. Outside of China – which GWIs numbers exclude due to the markets scale and government restrictions on internet usage, causing a proliferation of localised platforms – 48 per cent of the worlds online population use Facebook at least once a month. 82 per cent have a registered Facebook account, up nine per cent in the past six months.

Google+ is the second biggest social network by number of registered accounts, after seeing a 10 per cent increase over the last year, possibly due to the aggressive sign-up strategy Google has employed across its platforms recently, and is performing especially well in emerging markets.

Coming in a close third place is YouTube – which tends to take second place in mature internet markets – followed by Twitter – interesting, the single biggest social network in Japan – and LinkedIn.

38 per cent of internet users access social networks via a mobile phone, according to the report, up five percentage points year-on-year – a 33 per cent growth in actual user numbers, due to the growing mobile audience – compared to 16 per cent on tablets, up six percentage points or 94 per cent rise in user numbers.