Is Google Plus a ghost town or a hoe down?
While everyone is talking about Facebookâs desperate dash for cash (hashtags, really?), its purported rival from down the 101 has recently generated some of its own buzz.  Depending on which report you choose to believe Google+  is either: a) The second most popular social  network with 500 million registered users which will overtake Facebook in 2016 in share activity (+1â˛s versus âsharesâ on FB) Source: Janrain and Searchmetrics via  Venturebeat b) The Mountain View Kool Aid is overflowing at Venturebeat since only 2% of social sharing occurs on Google+  Source: Gigya  via Marketingland Firstly lets be clear on the most important point: Nobody you know uses Google+ and nobody is suggesting that more people will be using Google+ than Facebook at any point in the future. Facebook has about a billion registered users and Google+ 500 million.  Its most likely that both will continue to grow in lockstep, Google could narrow the lead through innovations in the home and both will have the necessary resources to buy off any competitor before they become a threat. Neither will ever have Twitters cool factor or real time âas it happensâ authority and the price tag will be too rich for anyones blood beyond a middle eastern royal family. First off lets look at some of the data Venturebeat was taken by in its write up about Google Plus. Heres the growth  trajectory of âplus ones and sharesâ from May 2013 to July 2016 :  Of course 3 years is an eternity in the digital space and who knows what and how we will be sharing on the interwebs. Reading through the report from Searchmetrics is a headache inducing experience given the conflicting statistics and fact forest. For example, in addition to the main attraction of the study (see above chart) referenced in the release, âSocial sharing on Google+ to overtake Facebook by 2016 predicts new studyâ  there is a different, longer study, referenced by Searchmetrics in bolstering its optimistic outlook on Google Plus. Here is the chart they link to in their press release: The trajectory of the red line is heading skyward while the blue line is muddling along far behind, hence its easy to presume Google Plus is dominating Facebook  from a growth perspective, which is true.  Here is the problem: Facebook  (as of when is not disclosed) generates more than ten times the shares of Google (29.6BN to only 2BN). So Google has a lot of catching up to do which Searchmetrics assumes will happen.Where this assumption comes unstuck is how Google is adding this activity: forcing all new Android devices to create a Google account, driving total Google+ activations  up while active usage trails behind at less than 25% of total activations. How many of these Google accounts will in time become active is unknown nor what they will be used for in the future. The second half of the Venturebeat piece are some stats from janrain, âwho makes tools to help web developers use social network logins on their sitesâ. They keep track of how often Google, Facebook etc are used to login to various web properties, mostly of a social nature. Here is the chart from janrain outlining how competitive Google Plus and Facebook are as an âoAuthâ social login: So its a two horse race with the exception of eCommerce logins where Pinterest is king.  Gmail, YouTube and Google.com are ubiquitous with an everyday repeat visition profile that transacts without much thought or attention. Venturebeat clearly includes this chart to support its headline POV that  âGoogle+ continues to dominate LinkedIn & Twitter, could catch up to Facebookâ when social logins do not correlate to actual use of Google Plus versus other Google services. Clearly if  you are using Facebook to login to a site you are active on Facebook. At this stage its not looking so good for Google Plus, given a review of the evidence at hand. The picture darkens when we switch to Marketinglands post and the results of a recent (Apr-June 2013) Gigya social login survey :   To clarify both janrain and gigya are using social login data, not the same source, each has a proprietary tracking system, but the same type of activity. jainrainâs research has Google Plus in second place and far ahead of  rivals like Twitter, Yahoo and âotherâ.  Gigya of course has Google Plus lagging far behind not only Facebook but all other rivals including âothersâ, garnering only 2% of all social login activity.  Marketingland notes that âWhen presented with data like this in the past, Google has typically explained the numbers by saying that most sharing on Google+ happens privately, making such sharing invisible to data crawling. But rather than data crawling, Gigya would be measuring clicks via its social tools that are embedded on client sites â so the charts above show that very few visitors to those sites are clicking to share content on Google Plus. In conclusion, its fair to say Google Plus is growing at a rapid clip although mostly due to piggybacking on Android activations. Google is far behind Facebook in the social space and will only catch up by extending the engagement loop to include the home and hoping Twitter stays in its corner. Searchmetrics involvement in this discussion needs to taken with a ladel of salt, they have pushed a controversial and counterintuitive narrative with little in the way of inarguable facts to support it. So a cynical attempt at driving awareness of them by exploiting the short attention span and pageview obsessed tech blogs  like Venturebeat. And here I am 800 words deep on z list blog talking about them too. Well played.   Â
The post Is Google Plus a ghost town or a hoe down? appeared first on Social Media Circus.
via WordPress http://bit.ly/13wwjJO
















