Google Plus is Still Google
Officially, Google Plus has more than 2.5 billion users, but many of these accounts exist because every Gmail address automatically has a corresponding Google Plus account attached to it not because all these accounts are necessarily active daily. And, Google hasn’t released any official user numbers recently, so we have little information on how many people actually actively use Google Plus.
Recently though, Google upgraded their social platform with a new feature called “Collections” It’s a Pinterest-like format. Just how much ground it’s gained is not yet known.
Google Plus is described by some industry authorities as “a social layer across all of Google’s services” rather than a social network.
A recent report says that 90% of Google accounts have never made a single public post on Google Plus. Figures come from an analysis of 516,246 randomly selected Google Plus profiles. It is estimated that 4 to 6 million people engage, interact and post publicly on Google Plus actively. These figures exclude YouTube (also owned by Google) comments, which are automatically posted on Google Plus.
If there are only a few million people actively posting to the Google Plus public stream, you would have to wonder why it still exists. For starters, there are most likely far more than a few million eyes on the Google Plus stream each month. Most users of this social platform rarely post anything, but rather just read other people’s posts. But, these people are just as valuable to advertisers as active users. Still, it’s very difficult to estimate their numbers.
Apart from user traffic, there is, of course, the value of the universal login that is tied to Google Plus.
People are now using Google search from an account that they are logged into, which makes it easier to track user profiles. So, despite the fact that the Google Plus stream does actually appear to be less actively used than all other major social platforms, don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.
Google Plus is still Google. And, Google is the internet God.
And, Google rewards you when you use their products by the likes of website optimization and how and where you come up in searches. Also, if you are active on Google Plus it is just one more search result that will push you that much closer to the tops of searches, so it should still be an important part of your online strategy.