When Google launched its proprietary social networking service,
Google Plus, in 2011,
Millions of people signed up for an account.
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However within months, critics had panned the service,
pointing to user pages and the lack of meaningful content and exchanges.
They said the new social site just wasn’t...very social.
It seemed as though Facebook had possibly cornered the market —
And...Google was just a little too late to the party.
Well not so fast....
According to recent data Google Plus is racking up large numbers of new users and could posssibly outpace Twitter as the world’s number two social network, behind Facebook.
The reasons behind Google Plus’s growth.
These reasons are tied to Google’s effort to build a connecting layer across all its services, including search, YouTube, maps and other products.
Log into one, and you’ve logged into the lot.
So...Google Plus can now boast 359 million active users,
up 33 percent from 269 million users at the end of June 2013, according to GlobalWebIndex. .
But of this number, only 135 million were actively posting to Google Plus pages.
Millions more were using some of the service’s features, such as clicking the “+1” button to show they liked certain web pages.
It remains far behind Facebook, which boasts 701 million active users, according to my readings,
though Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last year claimed more than a billion active accounts.
Still, the volume of Google Plus accounts suggests naysayers were too hasty in calling its demise. Like many social networking services, Google Plus has won over a devoted core of users.
One such convert is a New Zealand photographer
whose picture-centric Google Plus page has nearly five million follower
Indeed, this may be how Google Plus will find its niche
in the crowded social media world: Whereas Facebook is the go-to service for connecting friends,
Google Plus is more often used to meet strangers who share common interests.
Google Plus acknowledged as much last year by adding its “Communities” section, which hosts a diverse mass of groups and lets users join a “hangout” — the popular group video service.“We’re extremely happy with our progress so far, and one of our main goals is to transform the overall Google experience and make all of the services people already love faster, more relevant, and more reliable,” Google said.
But some observers remain skeptical that account holders are doing much on Google Plus, and see it as little more than a tricked-out sign-in service for Google’s products.
Another social media manager at Mediaworks, a marketing agency in the English city of Newcastle, said she is doubtful Google Plus will ever catch up to Facebook, but she warns clients not to ignore it.
“An authoritative Google Plus account is one of the factors that will help you rank high on Google (search results),” she said, noting that a popular Google Plus account was an important criterion in the search algorithm that ranks pages.
But she doesn’t see the service expanding far beyond the business and marketing world — at least for now.
“Whoever I ask, everyone has a Facebook account. I don’t know anyone who has a Google Plus account unless they are in the industry, and that’s because they have to,” she said.
GlobalWebIndex’s latest figures show that while Google Plus is the second-most popular social networking service after Facebook, Twitter is actually growing at a slightly faster clip, increasing from 206 million users at the end of June last year to about 297 million today, a rate of about 44 percent.
The study also found that usage was growing fastest among older people, especially with Twitter, confounding stereotypes that social networking is for the young.
GlobalWebIndex is a London-based firm that tracks Internet users through a series of surveys in 31 countries, with an annual sample size of about 120,000 people. It asks respondents which social platform they have directly contributed to in the last month and said Google itself uses its numbers internally.
The study found that Facebook also continued to grow rapidly, at about the same rate as Google Plus.
But the leading social network is also said to be battling “Facebook fatigue” in some countries, with some users growing bored of the service or else bemoaning its myriad changes to privacy settings and other tweaks, including the growing prevalence of sponsored content.
A study by the Pew Research Center in February found that more than half of US Facebook members had taken breaks from the leading social network. While the top reason was they were just too busy, people also cited fatigue with the service.
A retired choreographer from Portland, Oregon, said she tried to close her account after getting fed up with changes and a news feed becoming increasingly cluttered with sponsored content.
“It’s one of those things where you think ‘OK, I have no control,’ and that may have been the final straw,” she said.
But within 10 days of deactivating her account, she was back on Facebook.
She missed her friends.
with the income potential of a
‘Newly Minted, Silicon Vally, tech-zillionaire’
This concept must be conceptually powerful,
as I am very careful to fully endorse anything…
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