Google+ will be three years old on June 28, 2014 (Google+ brand pages won’t turn 3 until November 8, 2014), and a new infographic from DPFOC is filled with facts and stats about Google’s latest attempt at social networking.
As you can see in the infographic, Google+ has over 300 million users, and while that is a very large number of people, it is still only a quarter of the users that Facebook has. Furthermore, Google+ has a very large number of inactive accounts.
Google+ also has a more targeted demographic of users — predominantly males in technology or related fields while Facebook’s users come from all fields and are split almost 50/50 between males and females. Google+ also suffers from poor navigation that makes it seem more intimidating and less user-friendly than other social networks.
However, those negatives only tell a small part of the story for Google+.
Looking on the positive side, Google has seen great success in using Google+ as a tool to support its social search functions and to integrate its various products more closely. Google has also gotten far more information about users from their Google+ profiles and use of the Google +1 button across the web. According to the infographic, the +1 button is used over 5 billion times each day and websites that use the +1 button have three times more visits on a daily basis than sites that do not use the +1 button. Furthermore, the average Google+ user spends 12 minutes on the site per day, and the Google+ mobile app was the fourth most used mobile app in the latter half of 2013.
In other words, Google+ might be a long way from competing with Facebook, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a success for Google. Remember, Google’s core brand mission isn’t to be the world’s biggest and most popular social network. It’s to organize the world’s information. Google+ is just one part of making that mission a reality.
What’s ahead for Google+? Only Google knows the answer to that question despite the many rumors that have circulated in recent months (some of those rumors are mentioned in the infographic). One thing is for certain, Google won’t hesitate to kill a product that isn’t adding value to its mission. However, Google+ seems to have more value to give. What do you think?
You can see all of the statistics in the infographic below.
Image: Tanja Scherm licensed CC BY-SA 2.0
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
