A report has appeared on Fastcompany.com which says that thirty percent of people who make a public post on Google+, never do so again. The report, from analysts RJ Metrics, also says that when people log on to Google+ they normally wait another twelve days before going public again. And then, on average, it gets less than one reply, one share and one +1 or ‘like’.
RJ Metrics say that these statistics show that Google+ is not attracting anything like the amount of ‘addicted’ users as other social networking sights such as Facebook. People are not really using the site and when they do a lot of the time they don’t come back again. Fifteen percent of users who made five public posts didn’t return.
Google+ has heard this bad news before. Analysts ComScore reported in February that people spent, on average, seven hours a month on Facebook compared to just three minutes on Google+. Google are refusing to provide data that will back their claims of 170 million users of Google+ whereas Facebook provides such data, showing that it has 900 million users.
Google say the report is unreliable because it only reports on public posts and doesn’t really represent the activity and sharing elsewhere on Google+. They say that a lot more goes on privately than publicly. They also say that this is one of the main advantages of Google+, that a person doesn’t have to share everything like their thoughts and photos with the rest of the world.
RJM have conceded that this is true to a certain extent and that private data may tell a different story but they were only able to look at public data. Perhaps if Google were to make the data public, like they say they have, then we might get the full picture.
