Is Google Plus Catching up with Facebook and Twitter?
Google+ has announced its arrival at the 40 million user mark. While it sounds very impressive, there are still reservations about whether the social media site will ever be as big as the big two.
Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social networks, with both staggering growth levels and colossal figures to put down on paper, but could Google+ be catching up with the web’s biggest players?
40 million users in such a short amount of time can seem like an exciting figure for a newbie, but we all know that this isn’t the search engine’s first attempt at socialising. Google Plus is round two of what has already risen and fallen before. Has Google learnt from their mistakes? Could the search engine have hit the nail on the head this time?
Measuring Social Media Numbers
There’s a huge difference between sign-ups and active users, so maybe we should hold our horses before showering Google Plus with praise. The figure released by Google details the number of people signed up, not the number of people who are actively using the site every day, or even every week.
For a brand new social network with so much chatter and media attention surrounding it, it’s not surprising that people are curious and want to be a part of the next big thing. But how big will it be when the hype dies down?
For all we know, a huge percentage of the current users could be dormant, so these figures only show us a small fraction of the bigger picture.
Inaccurate Social Media Growth Figures?
ComScore.com released stats and graphs a few weeks back when Google+ unique visitors reached a monumental 25 million. Based on this rate of growth, it was claimed that Google+ had become the fastest-growing social media website, speeding past Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.
Based on the 25 million growth rate, ComScore produced this graph:
Could it be true? Could that almost-vertical line continue to thrash the existing social media stars as it soars even higher into the social media clouds?
There are two things we need to remember here: 1) This accelerated growth rate may not always be the same, and 2) Google+ is yet to release the number of ‘active’ users.
When you make a direct comparison with the social networking King, Facebook (800 million users), we have to remember that Facebook’s numbers are based on active users. But there’s more info from our social media champ; these active users log on at least once per month, with 50% of them logging in every day.
Other figures from Facebook include:
• More than 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
• On average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day
Google hasn’t been able to release of the above information just yet, and the number of active users will be kept tight to its chest for a while we think. So until we have correlating figures, it’s too difficult to make any comparisons between the social contestants just yet.
So as we say “Congratulations!” to Google Plus on its success so far, we’re yet to get a glimpse of the real picture…..