How Big is Google +?
359 million active users
Number of users up by 33% since June 2012
25 million users in the first month
Demographics
Harken back with me and remember your life in September of 2011. You are waiting patiently for your official invite to start using Google +. If you weren’t ‘on the list’, you were desperately trying to get an invite from someone in your networks. The launch certainly created quite a frenzy – Google has a very clever (maybe even genius) marketing department. By the time the site became “public”, the early adopters had already become heavy-users and social media buzz turned the mystery into a ‘must have’.
63% are male vs. 37% female, and the majority of users are between the ages of 25-35. However, the most jarring statistic might be the number of ‘inactive’ users. Yes, there are over 300 million people with a Google + account, but research shows that about 70% are ‘inactive’ users. Only about 17% are considered frequent or active users.
Google + has some serious SEO klout, but it has not been the Facebook killer it was advertised to be.googletv
Video and Google+
The recent Google + boom and longevity is tied to Google’s effort to build a connecting layer across all its services, including search, YouTube, maps and its other products. Log into one, and you’ve logged into the entire ‘family’ of your accounts and services. This makes it very easy to share content across many channels; from Youtube to Google + for example. For a marketer, it is very appealing to know that activity on social media can also boost your overall search ranking. It is a fact that an authoritative Google + account is one of the factors that will help you rank high on Google search results. A popular or active Google Plus account is an important criterion in the search algorithm that ranks pages.
Google favours video, but it favours video sharing and video popularity even more! Google makes it very easy to share media content from anywhere you are logged in, and the circle segmenting feature makes it very attractive for brands to ‘target’ their audience and track results. Is your video content intended to be B2B or B2C? Choose your audience and share your videos directly with your market.
A whopping 61% of the top 100 brands are represented on Google +. The ‘buy-in’ means that Google has done a great job convincing brands that Google + is a marketing tool, not just another social media site.
*Next in our Series’ The Social Saga’: Howdy! Welcome to the world of WordPress
