The Reality Of Using Google Plus For Promotion

There have been conflicting reports as to whether its worth the time to bother with Google+ when it comes to promoting your project. On one hand, the network has 2.2 billion profiles, of which Google says 500,000 are active per month.

That still pales in comparison to Facebook, with its 1.2 billion active users, but it's still ahead of Twitter, which has about 300 million.

But the Google+ user numbers are deceptive since you automatically are signed up to it if you have a gmail or YouTube account. Many people choose to ignore G+ entirely and just use the Google service they need at the moment, so many of those accounts lay dormant.

So is G+ worth spending the time on or not?

Stone Temple Consulting wanted to find out, so they randomly selected over 500,000 G+ profiles and analyzed how active they were. What they found was that only about 10% were active users in some sense of the word, with 90.1% containing actually no content at all.

Extrapolated out across the 2.2 billion user profiles, that means there were only 212 million active users. But after further looking at those "active" users, it was determined that only 50 million of those users had posted more than 5 times. An analysis of those users found that only about half of those posted in the last 30 days and only 8 million had posted over 50 times.

For such a reportedly huge network, Google+ doesn't have a commensurate amount of activity. Some of the activity that it does have is artificial in that YouTube upload notifications and comments and profile picture changes are automatically posted, but real live active users are far fewer than believed.

That said, if you know that's where your fans are, then that's where you should be as well. Google+ still has one of the best communication apps anywhere in Hangouts, which alone is worth spending time on the platform.

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