Google+ vs Facebook – Infographic

Written by Jeff Bullas - 329 Comments
Categories: Facebook, Google Plus, Infographic, Infographics, Social Media, Social Networks

I am starting to wonder if Google+ is a waste of time as a marketing platform for bloggers and brands.

Google+ launched with a bang last year and has now reached over 170 million registered users and 100 million active users.

The demographic is mainly male at 67%, the average age is 28 years old with a technical bent.

I do like the Google+ interface and I am sure it had a significant impact on maintaining competitive pressure on Facebook to keep its user interface fresh with its new “Timeline” design rollout and evolution.

But there is a problem.

Google+’s engagement levels are so low that actually rank behind MySpace and almost any other significant social network you want to mention.

Google+ Engagement is Poor

Research from RJ Metrics shows that that despite the large user base they are hardly spending any time on the site whether vthat is publishing, reading or engaging.

Here are some of the findings:

The average post has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share.
30% of users who make a public post never make a second one.
After making five public posts, there is a 15% chance that a user will not post publicly again.
Among users who make publicly-viewable posts, there is an average of 12 days between each post

Other research reveals that Google+ users spend on average only 3 minutes per month versus Facebook at over 400 minutes.

What about Traffic Referral?

I am finding that it is hardly referring any traffic to my blog (despite having over 7,000 followers on Google+)

In speaking to other bloggers at the “Social Media Down Under” conference recently they agreed that they were only posting there because it was Google.

What I am finding also is that Pinterest drives more traffic to my blog than Google+.

A lot of users are posting but only because it is a Google property!

Here is some more information via an Infographic regarding Google + vs Facebook

Infographic by Pardot.com

What About You?

How are you finding Google+…is it a ghost town? Is it driving traffic for your website or blog?

Look forward to hearing your feedback and stories.

More Reading:

Tags: Bloggers, Facebook, Facts and Figures, Google, Infographic, Social Media, Social Networks, statistics

mirka s.

For a long time, I hardly ever checked my g+ feed but this has changed recently. However, at least among my (fb and g+) circles, the typical use case of these social networks is very different. On g+, users’ activity is very unevenly distributed (or concentrated) compared to fb. For those who are active on g+, they often adopted it as a microblogging platform, sharing interesting links and observations, instead of vacation and wedding albums (fb). Also, the most active ones in my g+ circles I don’t know in person. So to me it seems that g+ is a competition for twitter rather than for fb.

In addition, I have selected the ones I follow on g+ primarily to make my g+ feed interesting rather than to keep in touch (fb). Eventually, the g+ feed really has become more interesting than my fb feed, so in my case, the time share between g+ and fb is gradually shifting towards g+. It didn’t happen in a day but now I would say that for g+, the future looks bright.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks for that insight and feedback
http://twitter.com/NikoBogio Nikolaos Bogioglou

If you play properly with you Lists in Facebook and your subscriptions all in order, then you will have an even better experience and a more interesting Feed, even competing Twitter when it comes down to usefull info Feed. Dont use your default feed to get to see any interest in it or any usefull info … Facebook has the edgerank thingy that will mostly beat your default feed with smiley babies rather than actual usefull info.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks Nik for those tips
http://www.googlingsocial.com/ Chris Lang

I will agree with you Nik on EdgeRank. Since I write mostly about Google Plus and Search I get filtered highly by EdgeRank.

Chris Howes

I’ve generally mirrored our FB posts for C2 Innovative on G+ and am astonished at the almost complete lack of engagement with our Public posts. I thought our content would have some resonance with the G+ demographic, but I was completely wrong. I’ll keep posting (because it’s Google) but I most certainly wouldn’t bother creating dedicated content for that platform.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks Chris for your comment and your attitude completely mirrors mine.

AMK

Also came here bc I was referred from G+. So as not to repeat, I agree with those above who’ve made positive comments about G+.

http://profiles.google.com/snarlingbadger Kristin Moran

Have you made any dedicated posts on G+? I’ve found the best conversations happen with people who interact, rather than who just mirror posts, or post items without comment.

You’re going to get out of G+ what you put into it. If you don’t make any effort, why should people follow your stream and interact with you?

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks Kristin and yes I have posted quite a few in the past. And I agree on the putting the hard yards in.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks Mila for that insight on what you see as Google+ ‘s strengths.
http://twitter.com/JanetBoyer Janet Boyer

The only benefit I’ve found with Google+ was that posts land on the first page of the Google search engine (which is great when I’m chatting about my books or the current art/words project with husband).
Impressionsplus

Google + is no longer an option for local marketing. This one fact will drive engagement going forward.

If you are making comparisons, do it based on Facebook at 170 million registered users vs Google + at 170 million registered users. Anything else is apples vs oranges.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks for the contribution to the conversation.
G+ ueberfan

Better still: compare Facebook after one year of existence to Google+ now (almost one year old). Facebook had about 5 million users then.

http://www.austrianalpineholidaysblog.com/ Linda

Good morning Jeff!

I absolutely detest FB, Twitter et al, so for me Google+ is the lesser of all evils and I find it easier to locate and consume information shared. Probably because it looks easier to read to those of us who have a love of language!

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks Linda, that seems like a thumbs up for Google+ to me

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks J.C for the heads up on the public vs private, but do you see it as a source of traffic for bloggers and brands?
http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks for the comment and input. It all comes down to time and resources and getting the results you want for your goals.

J.C. Kendall

Isnt that kinda the point, Jeff? You only get out of Google + what you put into it. It is not a place where you can turn a firehose on others, in a one-way form of communication and expect results. As I mentioned before, engagement is key.
Stephanie Van Pelt

True, it does come down to time and resources. I just wish that more tech reporters, journalists, etc would dedicated some time and resources before writing an article about it. It’s kind of hard to discuss engagement level there if you’re not really taking the time/resources TO engage.

http://twitter.com/AKallevig Annette Kallevig

Hi Jeff, interesting discussion. Theres a lot of questioning the validity of the comparison, but I have a simpler issue: Is the designer trying to emphasize differences beyond what’s there. There’s a picture of a Female on the Facebook side, but 57% male is still mainly male? Not surprising anyway since Google+ is new and early adopters in this business tend to be male and tech and the business itself arrives first. Taken away the age difference and mainstream aspect I don’t think this is much of a difference at all. Would be more interesting to compare to Facebooks first birthday. Since it sprung out of a dating site my guess is it might be interestingly dissimilar to the rest of our business, and that1s a more interesting discussion.

Also – a question for you: Are there any Social media Dashboard tools tha include Google + yet? I use Hootsuite, Sproutsocial and Buffer, and think I would post more to Google+ if I had access through my usual tools.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks Annette for dropping in and contributing. You are right, there is not much integration into the third party platforms.

Hojomo

Unaccustomed as I am to taking you to task Jeff, I feel you are being overcautious too early.

You omit the key infographic numbers – Registered Users and Active Users – BOTH, strangely enough, are 59% in each case!

How many serious conversations would have been conducted in the early years of Facebook? Now I know we are far more internet-savvy now, but the “wedding & family photo set” are not going to move into G+ just for the sake of it – if you want to try to sell to them, stay in FB!

FB itself would have been dominated by nerds & geeks in the early years; Google pitch themselves at “Up-to-Date Geeks”, so that’s what they get – 67% Male & Av Age of 28!

Growth rate has indeed been phenomenal, and I believe it will be sustained due to the repeated comment “because it’s Google”. If that happens, G+ will pass 900 million inside 5 years, not 8 & a half like Facebook – it will be a different world by then too.

“Horses for courses” is really the only concern here for marketing, which, at this precise moment, supports your opening comments – marketers need an audience. 900 million is a fair size audience!

BUT, if the majority of the 530 active FBers use it as a lounge – to chat in & share pictures & recent experiences – they are not going there to be sold to, or indeed to buy, thus making them an uphill struggle for marketers without changing the game completely to encourage businesses to become social businesses. When THAT premise applies, Google in it’s many forms moves into the foreground because we use a search engine to find things, often goods & services to buy!

A great evolution is taking place in the ground that Google is breaking with G+.

As already mentioned by another commenter, people are finding new & innovative ways to use the platform – THAT will be it’s strength & opportunity, so the tying in of Search & Places/G+Local is just a natural part of the evolution.

As a marketer, be in Facebook for now, but make sure you are in G+ for the future!

Thanks for the piece Jeff!

Your dedicated fan,

H

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks for the feedback on your experiences. I am on both and i will be for a long time but I will focus on the platforms that achieve my marketing goals.

Dave

At last somebody has said it! Google+ is a mystery to me, never have quite understood what it was about and how it worked. I have a presence there just because it’s Google but, like you Jeff, I find my site gets more referrals from Pinterest.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks Dave for your feedback on your experience.

http://twitter.com/NikoBogio Nikolaos Bogioglou

Dont forget Google Plus is a Raw Copycat … It did not come into the picture to make any kind of addition to the users daily habits, but to …. replace (?) as a copycat, facebook itself (?). Twitter is a great separate addition, so is Linkedin, Pinterest, even myspace has something diffirent to offer. How can a user get to Google+ when his very exact need is served better via Facebook … I cant see any different addition to the Social Media World on Google’s behalf. If they keep it like that they will always be running behind and exhausted.
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http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Great to hear about your experiences on Google+ it seems we have a very cool and passionate conversation happening!
http://www.facebook.com/broadhurst Martin Broadhurst

I think Google are playing the long game here. Unlike previous failed efforts to get “social”, G+ has a very active user base and fantastic features. Give it time…

Also, this infographic made a fairly glaring error by saying the top brands on Google+ are Android and other tech brands. What about Cadbury’s, who have 1.5m people circling them? They’re a mainstream consumer brand and they are using google+ incredibly well.

https://plus.google.com/112767041460502214504 Greg Miernicki

…don’t forget Mrs. Spears has 3 million + followers

http://twitter.com/murrayrjr murrayjr

Google+ didn’t work for us. We saw the potential and created a project to actively up our Brand on Google+ and to try and get people to +1, share, etc… It didn’t work. The audience just wasn’t there. We were locally focused in the Atlanta Metro Area. There was just not an audience there. By contrast we also recently did a project with Foursquare and Pinterest. Both of those have been successful in creating more engagement in different ways. Foursquare was interesting because we could actually show real money ROI to venues by showing that people were using our recommendations within 24-48 hours. Not much referral traffic from Foursquare, but people spending real money ROI is even better. We tried with Google+, but right now it just isn’t worth the effort. At least not for us.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks for the feedback and insights from your personal experiences with Google+

Katrina

Thanks for this awesome post! Indeed, Google+ is like a dead planet but still influencing the overall Google search results. That’s why companies do go for it and create a company page. So they’re only participating because they feel obliged to do so… This has nothing to do with real engagement.
http://socialmediasun.com/ Adam Justice

I’ve been faced with an odd conundrum. To increase engagement on my posts, I’ve started writing short 200 word synopsis and using some formatting to make my G+ posts stand out more. It helped with activity, I routinely get about 30 actions between likes and re-shares (not many comments lately), and one post from 2 weeks ago touting an SEO article I penned charted 72 +1, 57 Re-Shares, and 24 comments. To add context, I don’t have that many followers, only 3k or so.

The problem is, people aren’t clicking the link! They are sharing the short rant about my article, but their followers aren’t there to click it. I have more activity on G+ in the last month than page views on the blog. That’s not metrics that encourage me because anything more than a subtle change in approach on a social network can dramatically alter engagement.

http://profiles.google.com/snarlingbadger Kristin Moran

Are you commenting on OTHER people’s posts, or better yet, resharing those you find interesting?

If you make your G+ stream “all about you,” you are going to find that few people are interested in you (ie., will not only circle you, but engage with you).
J.C. Kendall

If your stream is a firehose, (one way) you wont get much engagement coming back your way. You really do have to post on other’s threads as well. It’s not who you circle, its who circles you. Most of the people I circle are people who say interesting things on other’s threads, and I want them sharing on my stream too. Two-way-engagement, dude.

http://twitter.com/eadamquinn E Adam Quinn

Seems Google is trying to bring more users to Google+ by slowly switching over Google Places to integrate with Google+ Local pages. As of now, you must be a Google+ user to comment on any of these pages.

Whoever gets the social search thing down will win. IMO there is still way too much spam out there and too much time spent filtering crap search results.
Lisa Grover

Funny, I am personally digging G+ more and more over time. But as a marketer, I can appreciate the impatience with a tangible ROI.
Lisa Grover

Funny, I am digging G+ more and more over time. Unlike Facebook, I don’t know but a few of the people in my G+ circles but find them incredibly knowledgeable, sincere and willing to engage at a level that Twitter just can’t provide in 140 characters. As a marketer, I can appreciate the impatience with a tangible ROI, as our business page has really only enjoyed the additional bump in search results on searches for our brand and content we have hash-tagged.
Paul

This is a really good point. Networking is the key to bringing in more people that are engaged. Its more of a post board than a conversation at times.
http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks for that detailed outline of how Google+ works for you.

Serious?

Jeff, even your contributions to this “discussion”, on your own blog, sound like the kind of boilerplate answer I’d get from Comcast or IBM. And for this kind of “advertising” or “brand management” FB or twitter is great, exactly because they’re built around a lot (in number) of limited (in depth) connections. G+ on the other hand is much more resistant to this kind of marketing bs.

There are lots of people who have connected with their fans or users, and have gotten a lot of publicity for their brand on g+ (Daria Musk and H&M jump to mind) exactly because they’re posting lots of interesting content, interacting a lot and treating people that follow them like people, not like numbers or traffic.

I like g+ exactly for this reason, I can share more interesting things, and have more interesting conversations with my friends and family. Plus I can also follow these people who are sharing interesting things with a wider audience. I’m probably not generating any useful statistics for them that are going to show up on an infographic, but I’m definitely much more like to be, or stay, an actual customer.

Scott Winberg

I hit and run FB to quickly see what my friends are doing. I keep G+ up all day and interact with the people there more.

Kevin Oedekoven

I’m with Scott on this. As a closed loop, FB is for seeing what my friends and family did over the weekend. While the open loop in G+ is for interacting with customers and cross-industry leaders in an effort to grow my company’s brand as well as my personal circle of associations.

That Dutch Guy

From my experience, G+ gives back what you put into it. When I ditched facebook, and instead signed up for G+, I was afraid that it was going to be a marketing driven semi-interactive experience. As a result, my stream was mostly dead, and my circle of contacts hovered around 30 people, half of which it seems had the same experience.

It wasn’t until I started interacting with people, that my circles started growing rapidly… and at the same time I noticed I was being added to more people’s circles.

If I see someone who circles me, and there’s no original content or nothing but marketing speak, I ignore, and many of the people in my circles have the same attitude. We’re not interested in pure marketing, ads or PR. What we expect is *engagement*. Bring something interesting to the table. Start actual conversations. Respond to people’s questions and inquiries.

G+ is an *active* community – some of the people in my circles have, themselves, thousands of people in theirs, and vice versa.

The way I see it is pretty simple: if you have a product you want to sell, facebook lets you plaster people’s walls with ads (and many people *block* these very ads with a plethora of plug-ins and add-ons, because they’re jarring, in the way). On G+, you can’t just toss an ad in, because it will ignored – you need some people to actually spend time and communicate to advertise your product. And I’m not talking about bots that circle people and puch ad-talk… they *will* be living in a ghost town, because nobody wants those in their circles. I’m talking about a dedicated team that becomes part of the stream.

To throw in a phrase I’ve seen a lot: the paradigms are shifting. People are fleeing from TV, blocking old-fashioned advertisements. If you’re in it for the money, you’ll need to adjust to the increasing demand for interaction and acknowledgement of your customers.

Simply sitting there, tossing out a block of text and waiting for no reaction to come, and then stating there is no active community worth targeting is a thing of the past, and it shows you’re missing the point of what *communities* are about.

facebook isn’t a community: it’s a loose sampling of people who keep in touch with their rfamily and friends, that play games all day. G+ is a community of people—strangers to each other—who like to talk about all kinds of subjects, have civil discussions and share experiences.

http://twitter.com/drewmarkovitch Drew Markovitch

brilliant breakdown
Hagit

I have to agree with the Dutch Guy. With G+ you get what you put in.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Peter-Nelson/561683768 Peter Nelson

That depends on what you want out of it. If what you want is to keep up with your family and friends and they’re not using Google+ then it doesn’t matter what you put it, it won’t work.

http://www.uvrx.com/ James

Was about to post something along the same lines, but you have put it much more eloquently than I could have ever done.

I will add though. I’m glad that marketers, spammers, traffic whores etc think that G+ is a ghost town. Let them think it. The less of them on G+ the better IMHO
Cheers
Victor de la Fuente Seivane

A very detailed and clear post. Dutch Guy: +1
ed

Love it!

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Yes, some great engagement here!

Dutch Guy

I have to say, I’m kind of blown away by the fact that my comment is marked so high…

Just thought I’d try and explain how I (and a number of the people in my circles) see the whole thing. Thanks for the opportunity and the feedback.

(Also, I like how Disqus now allows me to use my G+ account. I *am* That Dutch Guy)
Tawani Anyangwe

For real

http://pymelibre.com Valente Espinosa

I have more engagement with a new universe of people in G+, maybe your experience varies, I connect better than with Twitter audience.
gman

apple rules
Jonathrx

Coming from G+ and I must say, I just love it!

It’s the best curating tool I’ve used yet. And 10 min per month… please, it’s more like a couple hours a day. Since I started using G+, I pretty much never use Facebook and Twitter.

So for me, G+ isn’t a ghost town.
Daniel Junior

Couldnt agree more with you Sally
jonfhancock

I came this way from Google+. You should definitely spend some time really engaging yourself on plus before you decide that there isn’t enough engagement.

My experience has been that the engagement on plus is smarter and more meaningful than on Facebook.

When I post “I have updated my app on the Google Play store” on Facebook, my mom and sisters like the status, and two or three friends will say “Cool”

The same post on Google+ will garner useful feedback about the update.
http://twitter.com/TIBoine Tor Ivan Boine

It´s like a party. lots of people complain that google+ is dead. And yet they have maybe circled 20-40 people. that could easily translate to 2-4 people on a party.

I dont see Google+ as a Facebook competitor. Only a supplement to the social sphere. I use Twitter and Facebook as well as Google+. All for different purposes really.

Found this from Google+
Dennis McDonald

Mike Elgan sent me here from Google+.

I think the “driving traffic” metric is one that really doesn’t interest me that much, so I’ll leave it to others to decide which platform is better. I use Google+ because of the quality content and interaction. In fact, I’ll be happy if advertising doesn’t mess up Google+ the way it has messed up Facebook. When I used to use Facebook the advertising I saw was mostly junk. If and when Google+ implements advertising within Google+ I hope it isn’t as annoying and irrelevant as Facebook advertising. But then, I don’t use social networks to see advertising.
http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

What a great conversation happening. My opening “thinking out aloud” statement on this article has been answered
Christopher Regan

I cherish my G+ account.
Matei Domnita

In my opinion, Google Plus is the best information sharing platform across the web. It gives much more than twitter (character limit) and facebook (only friends you add and accept friendship).
I can get enough interesting information on G+, but it all depends on the people in your circles and the way you organize everything.
Robert Butler

This is funny, because I found your article through Google+ as well as a lot of the people that are commenting on this posting. The funny thing I just got here like 5 minutes ago and have made a couple of comments so far and am still waiting for those to be approved while I see that the number of comments on this page has gone from 50 to 100 in just the time that I’ve been waiting for my first comment to be approved.
https://plus.google.com/104067355242126774300/posts?hl=en Dennis Smith

I’m way too busy on G+ to leave a full comment.
http://plus.lars.fosdal.com/ Lars Fosdal

I use Facebook to keep tab of personal friends and family. I use Google+ for things that interest me. Sent here from Google+.
Robert Butler

OMG, I refreshed the page once and now it’s gone from 100 to 150 comments! In just a few minutes! Who said there’s no engagement on Google+? Wow, someone really needs to do their own research!
Matt Forman

G+ works for me, I discovered this post there. But as usual it’s horses for courses and G+ is much better suited for B2B and more technical brands. Facebook still rules for B2C brands.
Jacob Markussen

It has all been said!
But I just wanted to add that I love G+ for all the things you mentioned on the left side of that infographics! I’ve joined Facebook AFTER I joined G+, and G+ is so much better for discussing everything I find interesting, with everyone else who has the same interests!
Facebook is, as you show, just Likes and status updates, which are for most utterly irrelevant…
Phil Szomszor

j
Robert Butler

This is amazing! It’s like standing at the face of a tsunami! It’s gone from 150 to almost 200 comments already in less than ten minutes! Are you ever going to approve my comments?
https://plus.google.com/117530250543183103093?rel=author Rick Bucich

Greetings from G+ – I loved Friendfeed so G+ felt comfortable like a glove. There’s a reason why those who have embraced it love it.
KC5ZRQ

I have facebook blocked in my router and I live a full and fruitful life!
oluwande

Howv
Phil Szomszor

Funnily enough, I’ve been looking at Google+ more closely too and, as an experiment, have decided to give up Twitter for a week and try Google Plus (I think Google+ is more of a threat to Twitter than Facebook). Interestingly many of my peers/colleagues couldn’t handle the prospect of not tweeting for 7 days.

Anyway, if you, or anyone else reading this has a view or wants to join in, check out “Cold Twerky” Week (forgive the wordplay) http://www.theredrocket.co.uk/blog/?p=2126

Good blog post and great stats by the way – very interesting.

Robert Butler

Don’t quit Twitter! I like Twitter too. There’s plenty of good shares on the Twitter and I see Twitter (much like Google+) being dominated by the media which is why I like them both. Unlike Facebook which was dominated by my very uninteresting friends, Google+ and Twitter actually have fun and exciting circles of people!

Goulooze

Grwetings from ghost town.
Crazybob74

We’re heeeeeere…..
Phyre

Jeff, you’re entitled to your opinion, but I’m going to respectfully disagree about Google+ being a waste of time.
oluwande

I use G+ daily…more than Facebook. Granted all of my friends haven’t migrated and I don’t expect them to. G+ for me isn’t a Facebook killer. It fills the void between a blog, twitter and Facebook.
http://twitter.com/chris_j_powell Chris Powell

I was among the lucky first to grab hold of Google+, it has taken some time for me to add YASN to my daily schedule but I was pointed to your post by a G+ post…so Engagement isn’t too bad…I get tons of crap on Facebook…it is time for a change. Especially for Geeks Like Me!
Rijan Maharjan

Referred to your blog from Google+.

I quit facebook about a year ago (sometime in early july) and switched to google+ and I’m on it because it’s a content based platform. There’s real engagement and it’s filled with news I need.
Michael Fullerton

Umm … Jeff …

If you aren’t getting engagement on Google+, you aren’t doing it right. It’s not twitter. It’s not Facebook (thank god). It’s Google+. You don’t drive a Ferrari like a Yugo.
http://www.kijanamokiwa.com/ Stephen

Very true as many people have said so far, comparing G+ and Facebook is not bringing a true picture, while Facebook is mostly where you can go have fun and stay intouch with friends G+ is a place where there is serious issues, you learn, and discover. You meet and engage with people who in some ways may even inspire your professional life!
Micah Snead

It’s not a truck!
Mukul Modi

You get out of it what you put in. Also, don’t forget that by default posts are private so analysts wouldn’t see the traffic spike as Facebook, whose posts are public by default. Facebook plays the numbers game by making everything Public. Google is playing realistically and for the user when they make things private by default.
Go Away

Go away. Enjoy facebook.

Feel free to cite this as an example of an obnoxious G+er.
NSIT DIT

Were you in your senses when you created this infographic?? Facebook has 900 Million ACTIVE users, not registered users. It has 500+ Million daily active users.
Ruttman

Who ya gonna call? Google+ is not a ghost town. But, yeah it’s not FB and that’s good. I like interacting with intelligent people. Most aren’t ready for this yet. Some never will be.
Paschalisblue

currently g+ is not full of idiots.
but when it will be, it’s built that way so you can avoid them easily!
so, if you are waiting all those spammers, no-life ppl to join g+, and make g+ usage charts better, you are wrong.
Ian

Came here from G+. No engagement what? ; )
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=550205830 Luke Storer

Ayoub, I think it’ll be a while before a fair write ever gets penned, the two are so fundementally different. Frictionless sharing and becoming a platform for social news readers and applications is slowly going to kill facebook. It pretty much trys to stalk you across the internet now.
Aerin

I respond to original content when posted on G+. If someone is doing nothing but posting links to their blog without any kind of commentary indicating why I should click through (I followed a link here from G+ that had its own discussion of the post), I’m very unlikely to do so, and I usually end up uncircling them if they don’t post anything else of interest.

The level of discourse on G+ is a completely different world than Facebook. The culture that Facebook has bred is one of narcissism and inanity, while G+ has bred a culture of respect and intelligent conversation. But it’s not a passive thing; you have to seek people out and interact with them if you want them to interact with you. A lot of people I know will uncircle people who’ve never actually talked to them in any way.

Facebook is merely an extension of your meatspace interactions. G+ is more like a message board; it’s a new, organic community of its own.
Pangolin

Checking into my Facebook account has now become an unwelcome chore. I do it so that I can find out about local events. There is very little discussion about ideas or projects and lots of personal grandstanding and social stroking.

The typical G+ post is a conversation about making things. The typical Facebook post is people sitting in a bar. On G+ there aren’t so many picture memes and kid/kitty pictures and a lot more conversation and interaction than I ever find on Facebook.

Quality trumps quantity.
Robert Butler

I have an honest question to ask about your statistics since I’ve seen a lot of numbers thrown around comparing all of the social networks (of course mostly about Google+ and Facebook recently) and I have to wonder why you would compare Facebook’s total user base after it’s been operating for eight years (since 2004 right?) to Google+’s numbers which only started publicly last year?

To top it off you don’t even mention what the growth rate or direction of change has been year to year when comparing them both? If this was supposed to something like a chart of a stock you’d be missing a lot of data there.

I mean just off the top of my head if you just consider the fact that within one year, the number of registered users on Google+ is already close to 25% of that of Facebook you immediately would see that it’s rate of change is 4x that of Facebook, right? Please correct me if I’m wrong. Or even better why not do the math yourself and put it in that infographic of yours.
http://twitter.com/AndyGait Andy Gait

Today Facebook informed me that Dan was late for work, Clive had beans for lunch and Sam posted a picture of her cat (again). Google+ informed me of your interesting piece.
Google+ wins.
Adayley

Google+ for me is connections with fewer people but higher quality interaction with those people. Facebook is lots of noise.
Datcha8

There are several items that differentiate G+ from fb, and several are highlighted in your post and graphic. I disabled my facebook a year ago, because I noticed I was wasting hours of my day on fb with 1) likes, 2)status updates 3) comments. All of which lead to absolutely no knowledge gain or personal growth. I recently killed facebook completely with the new updated g+ interface and active public user base posting interesting articles with content, and their opinion on the content, and then the open discussion that occurs with the public post. I can easily share stuff with only certain people using groups. Their integration of video and pictures with other Google services also makes it favorable.

Facebook’s marketing is awful, last time I recalled. The ads weren’t things that I cared about, I was constantly bombarded with invites to games I didn’t care about, and again, the majority of the posts were worthless status updates of what people are doing.

P.S. I was linked to this article through g+ where the original user posted his thoughts on your post, IN ADDITION to the link. I believe that is key, and why g+ is starting to steal users. It’s a delivery mechanism for robust content.
http://dusanvrban.blogspot.com Dusan Vrban

Is Facebook a ghost town?

We get much more traffic from Google+. Our “friends” numbers are not growing on Facebook. What’s wrong with Facebook?

I know – it is about how much you actually give. We don’t give to Facebook and we give to Google+. So we get from Google+.
https://plus.google.com/109849949064289151509 Daniel Walker

I use G+ every day. It’s populated by smart geeks, musicians, artists & photographers. Facebook is populated by people like my teenage cousin. I know where I’d rather hang out.
Saravana Kumar Karthikeyan

Jeff – G+ is going to be the future … these comments would have made it very clear. You might have seen that of the 1000s of comments none are against it.

I hope the brands / people start ditching fb / twitter sooner and move on to g+ where posts are easily discoverable than any other network.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Today we have seen an awesome response to this post and it is obvious that Google+ is not a Ghost town!
There are so many fabulous passionate contributions from the Google+ tyribe that could be used in a future blog post or 2 or 3!

EmilieEggleston

Aha! Adjust the sails and look to the open blue. We’ve got some nurturing to do!

I’d humbly like to invite you to pick out some tips from my latest G+ tutorial on http://www.Gplustuts.com about brilliant posts for maximum visibility.

SEO is important for G+ posts, as is building relationships with people on their own profiles.

Zainal Hidayat

G+ sent me here.
RickL

Referred here from Google+ only staying long enough to say…
I don’t waste time on FB, Twitter etc.
Google+ works for me and my G+ tab is always open.
Casper

Boo
Paul Melrose

Since becoming active on G+, I’ve used FB less and less, and I no longer post there. There is just no comparison between the two. This is not a numbers game. It’s a quality game. I don’t need 900 million people on my preferred platform.
American Dude

Google+ is far more engaging than charts can describe. Just because specific brands are popular and everyone and their mother isn’t a user, doesn’t mean the conversation doesn’t make it an engaging network. It is easily feels like _the_ most engaging social media site of them all, if you’re using it correctly.

Facebook is great for friends and family. Twitter is great for business. Google+ is great for real communication with like-minded people. I’ve found great photographers, amazing writers, and even celebrities whose interaction on Google+ is far above anything I have seen from celebrities on other social networks.

Google+ is like a forum. Except it is a forum for everything and gives you better tools to create, share, and discover topics.
dcode null

I use Google + every day. I left facebook, as their privacy is a joke, their history in giving data over to the government is frightening, and it is simply a waste of my time.

Sure, there are people on facebook that can’t see me anymore, but gee, it’s been 7 months, and those who care came with to google plus, those who didn’t stayed. I’m better off without them.

Facebook is now the government’s database. It’s amazing… For a better look at my thoughts on ALL social networking, refer to the link below… (Stored in my Picasa albums, on Google…)
https://picasaweb.google.com/107772953447644265116/MoarHumor#5742462850512879858
Kathy Morlock

Hi, Jeff,

I’ve been on Google+ for about a year now. I have over 25,000 people who have circled me. I use Google+ for engagement and information. I post mainly public. I spend about 9 active hours a day on the site. Many people don’t post public, you won’t see that, it’s not information that you have access to. Today the stream was so busy, even on my large monitor the info was moving at a very fast pace. I make sure I vary my hours, because I have so many people all over the world, that I make contact with and I don’t want to miss interacting with them. The United States, Russia, India, Thailand, Pakistan, South Africa, Germany, Australia, Belgium all over South America and Canada to name a few. I have been voted an expert on Google+ for interaction and social media, as well as coaching new members. You may hear from some people it’s a ghost town. Well of course it looks like a ghost town if you come in, make an account, sit there and look at the screen and say where are all the people? It is all about interaction. Please stop comparing Google+ with Facebook. We are a lot of people with a wealth of different viewpoints, from all over the world interacting together; online, in hangouts, and sometimes in real life. Google+ is full of information, news, science, politics, tech, parenting, music, photography, friendship and lots of love. Hanging in Real Life (HIRL) with people you met on Google+, photo walks, concerts, artists and so much more. We raise money for charities and we try to help people in need. We have Book Clubs, Poetry Circles, Food & Cooking Circles and all kinds of different themed hangouts for business and for learning and/or pleasure. Click the mouse a few times and you can make your own page, mine is a reading page, where I post book reviews, so people have a place to browse and see what other Google+ members are reading. It’s an interactive page, where anyone can share and write reviews. These are just the personal pages. Click the mouse a couple more times and you are blogging. The business pages on our site our amazing, they are varied and there is an enormous amount of them.

I look at the stats posted above and laugh. The minute you walk through that virtual Google+ door everything is there just waiting for you, the possibilities are really endless, but it’s all what you make of it. Isn’t that the way life is?

When you walk through that door someone is there waiting to help you and guide you, all you have to do is wave and let them know you are there.

Come on over and make an account, sign in and I’ll show you around. You will find a thriving, integrated community. You won’t find a ghost town.

To date, I’ve not yet, seen one single ghost.

Have a great day.

Kathy Morlock

http://twitter.com/iaing80 Iain Green

Awesome response

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks Kathy for that insight. I am wondering if you would be happy to contribute a Guest post as an expert on Google+ on my blog? I have 200,000 readers a month who I am sure would love to hear about your tips and ideas about how to use Google+
Sent from my iPad

Justin Oliver

Kathy, I’m on the Google+ Community Partnerships team and would love to connect with you and hear your story. Can you reach out on G+ to discuss more? gplus.to/JustinOliver

scorpiousuk

Google+ took hold for me at the start of this year and within a month I was hooked and Facebook history. Status updates I love as there’s no limits, and you can actually tell it as it is. Photo upload from my Android phone is easy and instant. Video the same. I use hangout functions at least weekly. Its great.
Gaines Josh

Some might say “Get in where you fit in” wherever that might be.
http://www.mix-networks.com/ mIX

Hmm that info graphic pretty much says it all. Facebook has more people liking stuff (boring) and G+ has more people posting and commenting (interesting). Liking something isn’t good interaction.

I’m really enjoying G+ and Google services in general. I wasn’t even interested in Google services (other than Maps) until I got my first Android phone. It was everything I was looking for in a phone and the services made sense once I had a way to use them all the time.

I pulled the plug on Facebook after Christmas (I had been wanting to for about a year prior). My family and most of my friends at least have an account on G+, even if they don’t use it much. I just can’t support Facebook, I really disagree with the way they run things an don’t want anything to do with it.
Chulo Fernandez

From G+ as well, and like the rest i disagree with your statement.G+ is a great place to be and im sure it will only get better. Also under features can user base really count i mean G+ has circles and facebook has ..a user base?
iPaulPro

Sent by G+
Razo Marco

it is best to just ignore clueless journalist like him
Paul Melrose

I just went through your posts on G+ for this year. One re-share – of your own post. One other post that was not written by you – but mentioning you. The rest, all of them were links to you blog. So, no one is paying attention to you? Go figure.
sammywise

I have had a more engaging experience of G+ than I have ever had on facebook. The conversation is richer, and intellectually stimulating. I actually converse, learn, and engage my brain. Something that rarely, if ever, has happened for me on facebook.
C.J. Land

Wrong. Not a ghost town. Mike Elgan and Guy Kawasaki are two great examples of how user engagement rocks on Goggle+. Much different than Twitter and Facebook.

Before you shun the experience, give it 2 weeks of engagement and see if it does not change your mind.
Al Cornish

I was a heavy Facebook user (including developer and paid advertising user
for an online service), but am now using only two social networks: Google+ and Twitter. Facebook does have a lot of positive
attributes, such as the emphasis on real identity and the fantastic integration
with apps like Spotify and Instagram.
But I have no regrets about moving to Google+. I love Google+’s UI, including the ability to
edit posts and to easily set the target audience for my posts. It’s different from Facebook, in terms of
community, but the technology discussions are very interesting to me. When I posted in Google+ (public post) about
a problem I was having with a new device, I received some help from a stranger
– in this way, I’m making new connections with people who are interested in the
same things that I am. I will have to
work to encourage more of my friends to use Google+.
Sharad Gaur

Mike Elgan sent me here from Google+
Hmmm…

First off, the term ‘engagement’ is getting more ambiguous for social products. FB, G+, Twitter, LinkedIn aren’t the same product. I use G+ for sourcing content and discussing things that I find interesting - not for telling people I just ate some toast. On G+, for me, engagement is about contributing a solid opinion/point of view to a good discussion and hopefully learning something new. In the same vein on FB, ‘engagement’ can also be counted as me liking the ‘I just found a dollar’ status of a friend. I know what I’d continue using if push came to shove. If I couldn’t ‘like’ something from tomorrow onwards I wouldn’t care or miss it. If tomorrow I couldn’t take with like minded people on G+ or LinkedIn - I’d be upset. Engaging with the product and engaging with the content in a meaningful way are different things.
Michael Dux

When I compare my G+ feed… to my Facebook feed, I have considerably greater instances of conversations in G+, and far too many game updates in Facebook..

Not sure the infographic is holding true for me.

I still have far more contact in FBook, though the people that I communicate with through G+ are of a higher quality, averaged.
lizardb0y

I saw this post linked off Google+. I’ve been a user of Facebook and Twitter for a few years, and have been using Google+ since early beta. I have personal accounts on all three services, and a separate twitter feed, Facebook and Google+ pages for my hobby – computer history.

In terms of engagement outside of immediate friends and family, Twitter still leads the way, followed closely by Google+ and a very , very distant third by Facebook. My Facebook page never gained traction at all and I fairly much abandoned it – now it’s merely a syndicated dump from my blog and G+ posts. As an experiment I set up a Google+ page with similar content and immediately started to get regular follows and consistent engagement.

Furthermore, the quality of Google+ engagement is much higher than with other channels. Posts are longer, better written and informative. The majority of Facebook engagement looks no better than YouTube comments and misleading “infographics”. I expect better, and get better, from Google+.

It looks to me as if you’re rating the different platforms on how well they support your desire to push mindless advertising to a large audience – that’s not engagement, that’s junk mail. On Google+ I expect intelligent engagement and when I see a page or profile pushing products without intelligent engagement, I don’t circle. Perhaps Google+ got the model right, and it’s advertisers and marketers who need to catch up.
Domain Admin

Google+ is an interest network. If what you post is not “interesting”, it won’t drive much engagement.
Honestly, I don’t get that much engagement on my own (public) posts (I would say 3-4 comments and 10-20 +1s), but I still feel like it’s A-OK.
That and the fact that when I comment on other people’s posts, I always see other people commenting with me, I don’t get how this would mean that there is no engagement.
Oh, and 1/3 of my posts are limited, and they are the ones with the most interactions. They might be collaborative posts to schedule something (like a photowalk), hangouts with the family (almost weekly from 2 continents, 4 cities), etc.
So yeah, cross-posting, using g+ as “one more social network” won’t get you far.
But that’s what interesting, and that’s why brands could actually benefit a lot from the platform.
G+, as an “interest” network, seems way more appropriate to me for brand-consumer relationship than a network that is… well, made for “friends”.
Some people talk about “love brands”, well, not every brand in the world is a “love brand” or even a “friend brand”, but most sure as hell have interesting things to share with their consumers.
Oh, and when you think about how “engagement” on facebook now needs to be bought, I really do not get why this focus would be so important. Multinational companies will keep on using facebook, promoting their posts like they would use some standard media plan, whil SMEs will be stucked in a situation where nobody sees their posts if they don’t have the media-budget to go with it… whereas I truly believe that Google+ can be of great value to them, whether it be through circles (watch how Cadbury classifies their followers) or through meaningfull hangouts.
One final point, which is rather important:
- Google+ does NOT kill users’ other web properties. You take care of your g+ page? Well it will increase your follower base… but it will also provide better visibility on Google result pages… and as you cannot start contests on Google+, you will still maintain your OWN website(s).
- On Facebook, some brands focus so much on increasing their fanbase that they end up having no other choice than to base every piece of communication/media they think of ON facebook, leaving no room for their own website. This is… not really healthy if you ask me.

I know, I kind of slipped off topic, but it all fits together IMHO .
Kent Oldhøj

I’ve been a FB user for years. Not the most active, but at least connecting with friends and family. I tried to be more involving (being an old usenet user), but it was troublesome and i soon just chitchatted with the before mentioned friends and family. i believe i have about 200 friends on Facebook.

In august i started on G+. None of my friends or family have migrated to G+. But i now have +2000 followers there who engage and interact with me on a daily basis.

I’d say 50% of my posts are still public, but the other half are the interesting ones. Those who take place in smaller closed circles. You see, Google+ works like your real life does. You don’t discuss work matters with your neighbor. You don’t have intimate talks with your coworkers. You do those things in closed circles, with the people who are interested.

To find interesting people, go search for them! If they wanna be found, they have filled out a proper _about_ page to enable that. Use hashtags! Take a look at what happens on a specific topic, live in your stream. Or check out some of the shared circles on specific topics. Big fan of Ukulele’s? Nop problem i know where to find a circle with other Ukulele fanatics! And i bet they have some serious talks behind closed circles.

Google Plus’ biggest problem is getting new users to understand how things work, before they lose interest.

My activities on G+ are probably 20% public posts, 10% public comments, 20% circled posts and 50% circled comments.

If you have no interaction on G+, you’re doing it wrong.
Matt Ross

You’re doing it wrong Jeff. G+ is not even a year old and it’s leaps and bounds better than “the never ending high school reunion” that FB became for me.
Ari Malek

G+ is just plain more interesting. There’s rarely anything worth reading on FB, unless you’re into inane status updates. True, most of my “real” friends aren’t on there (yet?) But I’d rather maintain friendships in more personal ways anyway.
Angie Person

I absolutely love That Dutch Guy and Ayoub Khote’s responses. The only thing that I would add is that I don’t think you are really going to drive people to your blog via G+, BUT if you were to copy your blog posts to G+, you would see a lot more commenting and activity. I rarely care to click out to a blog, but if something is posted directly to G+ I usually read it. I know a lot of bloggers approach it this way.
Angie Person

Wow – I post a comment, and it is immediately blocked due to “abuse reports”? This is the first time I’ve ever posted anything here.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

There is something wrong with Disqus comments I think

Ash van der Spuy

Jawn, what an ill advised, badly researched article. Really, low engagement on G+?
That’s only if 1. You have not engaged. 2. You have not engaged. G+ is all about interaction, and there are heaps of people on there, it’s not the wasteland that people like you make it out to be. Circle more people, comment on more posts, you will get circled more, and get more engagement yourself.
Simple proof, Google has no ‘groups’ function like facebook, yet there are multitudes of people interacting via a hashtag, or shared circles, getting WAY more value out of group interactions than a facebook group ever could. If you are a brand and you are struggling with engagement on G+ its because you are not engaging.
J. Randolph Radney

This is an interesting view, and I appreciate Chris Brogan for suggesting it on Google+.

From my perspective, it is worth the wait for engagement to catch up. I introduce the use of Google+ in my university classes on professional communication to students who are almost universal Facebook veterans. Their delight with the tools available on Google+ and their resultant fervor to ‘convert’ their friends tells me that Google is doing something very right; it may simply take some time for the results to show.

While I could use a workaround with other apps, the simplicity of being able to record my class sessions using Google+ Hangouts-on-Air, as well as office hours, makes me a strong advocate, but students who are using Google+ to network with fellow students tells a much more eloquent story of the appeal of Google over Facebook.
http://www.spadesmedia.com/ Jim Banks

I have a few micro communities that I still visit Facebook to participate in, but Google+ has become my main source of activity.

The critical mass thing has always been a red herring to me, 900 million, a billion doesn’t matter, what does is the number of people I know who make it easy for me to keep up to date by curating topics of interest.

I tried using news readers but I subscribed to too many sources and got swamped by information.

I originally came over to post a comment because Chris Brogan said we should show you the power of Google+ @jeffbullas:disqus but that is more the power of Chris Brogan who has been an evangelist for it, along with Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble and others.

Once people get comfortable with Hangouts (on or off Air) and Local and get their circles and profile at the right level of optimization (as everyone had to do with Facebook) the experience is so much better. You have more from the people you know/like/trust and mute the asshats.

My disappointment is none of the Social Media providers do forum like discussions. Someone should buy Mirc and integrate proper forum discussions
Jeff in St. Louis

Personally, I’ve gotten a ton out of g+ and given a ton right back. As a photographer, I’ve had unprecedented access to a huge variety of expert advice I would never have been able to personally connect with before now.
Adam Anthony

If FB users are spending 400 minutes per month “liking” posts…where is the social aspect?!
Yawn!
I vote quality over quantity!
Clyde Norman

Google+ is more engaging then FB and the comments and post are always more in depth. I love it!
jeffery clark

I have had much more success in Google+ with engagement around topics that I am interested in. I now have regular chats about bread baking and other topic specific discussions that I can’t get in Facebook. I like Facebook for the friends status updates, but its cluttered with useless posts of links from ‘friends’ who have completely different tastes and interest than I do.
lizardb0y

Wow. I just went and checked out Jeff Bullas’ stream on Google+ – it’s no wonder he’s not getting engagement. It’s just an endless dump of self-referencing social network/marketing tosh.
http://www.wedyn.com/2012/06/ram-charan-teja-marriage-photos.html Ram

I find this article very tiring — not only is it incorrect in many ways but it lacks any vision about where the web and technology may move. I am sorry to say that I will chose to ignore your blog and your posts because of it.
Daniel Hollerung

All things worth your time require genuine effort, not lackluster posts and one way conversation. Engage!
EmilieEggleston

YOU’RE IN LUCK!
You too can be a G+ Rockstar if you pick up some of the tips found at http://gplustuts.com/how-to-serve-up-brilliant-posts-for-maximum-visibility/

Tips like…
* Search your topic before you post to open a discussion (great SEO)
* Add a personal touch with commentary; don’t be an auto-poster
* Upload an eye-popping graphic to go with your post
* Branch out and engage with new users

May your G+ experience improve!
Alex Pulver

I looked at Jeff’s links in his Google+ page and they point to his original blog entries. So I wouldn’t say he is posting zero original content.

Clayton Pritchard

Hey posts links without actually adding anything. Those are the marketing type posts that most people (like myself) skip and cause us to unfollow him.

Ant Pruitt

I love G+ and its engagement!

-RAP, II
Kevin Willock

I think you can clearly see that others can drive traffic to your blog via G+. It appears that you are not engaged with your circles. It’s also clear that you don’t spend much time on G+, it’s not as shallow as facebook, so it’s a cost of effort for entry is greater, but it’s far far far more rewarding, and interesting, and active than facebook ever has been.
Gryph Griffin

“spread across all industries…” IE “Quantity over quality.” What happens when you subtract out the Zynga Zombies? The infographic calls out
that Plus focuses on user content, while Facebook is more towards
“driving interactions.” Except for Edgerank preventing interaction.
Although if you can make it through the Edgerank, I’m sure all your
followers will see your links shining out from the midst of all the
Farmville, Cityville, Frontierville, Vomitville interaction going on.
Engagement is another word used to obscure the real intent which is
harvesting profit.

I have a Starbucks card, and the App. I’m a Gold member. Is it because
of their Facebook page? Admined by all those eager little graduates,
recently weaned off those steady diets of buzz terms and word salad?

No. It’s because I like their coffee, their merchandise, the ambiance of their stores. You know…the actual *real* shit. Which after subtracting their cost from the money I pay them, et voila, harvested profit.

People whining about page views are ones that are usually not selling
anything other than bullshit. Most of the time, bullshit with the serial
numbers filed off, and offered up as original.

Smart people see through this. Dumb people do not.

Which ones do you think actually buy things to get people to the other side of the ??? to the PROFIT?

Cheers.
Daniel Benton

Facebook has trivial information from people I used to know but dont care about. G+ has interesting information from all over the world and lets me interact with people I dont know. I came here via G+

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

I certainly don’t discount the importance of Google+ and have just taken a breather after moderating and approving comments on the blog. Just come back from commenting on the Tsunami of comments on Google+

Mbeemer

You haven’t been successful on Google+ that’s why you are bitter. You’re full of it, man.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

No bitterness here. Just awesome to have some passionate feedback from people that obviously love their Google+ . Nothing wrong with that.

Serin

G+ is better – I’ve met more friends (nearby or far away) then since the days of internet chatrooms (and we know those are no good anymore)
Chris Anderson

Jeff, It would be interesting to get a breakdown of all the comments here and see which platform the authors came from, Facebook or Google+. A quick browse tells me that they mostly come from Google+. That’s the difference between Google+ and Facebook. Google+ users engage a lot more.

The thing that I think sets Google+ users and Facebook users apart is their willingness to engage and meet new people.

Some people came to Google+ when it started and were confronted with a new program, and an empty wall, ummed and arrrred for a few minutes and thought, ‘well this is pretty boring, it’s like a ghost town’, and went back to facebook, where all their friends and family were.

Others came to Google+ and were confronted with a new program, and an empty wall, and thought, ‘Wow, these circle things are cool, I’m gonna go and fill these suckers up and get some content on these walls’, and never looked back.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

The comments were amazing and I will have to trawl through them and put together an article with the highlights. I am thinking of calling it “Why Google+ is not a Ghost Town!”

Kathy Morlock

Sounds like a plan
J.C. Kendall

I think that would be wise.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

It is all about learning, that is why I am here and in as many places as possible as time and resources allow
Cebastian Rosing

Google+ is what you make of it. And therefore a lot of my friends do’t know what to put of with it. And thereby saying it’s a ghost town.
I conclude two things of this:
1) You have to take action to get something out of Google+. It’s not about your friends and (mostly) not about your dull everyday life. It’s about making content and get engagement. You have to actively pursue this. Share, comment, +1 and hangout.

2) Because of it takes an effort to establish and maintain your Google+ experience, it’s not for everyone who are more than comfortable with their connections to the internet and their current social-networks. (As interaction and response is happening fast and to everyone they know (kind of)).
Although #2 is in theory pointless, because in a lot of ways, it can replace (i.e.) Facebook. But friends aren’t moving in masses, and primary sharing is happening on Facebook.
Worldwide; companies and other pages, are not common.

It’s a matter of time. Interaction and traffic is increasing, and it’s noticeable already now, it’s moving more towards the mainstream audience.

I am wildly in love with Google+ and it’s features and overall usability. Not to mention the main goal for Google; to make a social layer to their Google Services. It’s working, and working really well.
Jerry Johnson

An interesting blog post. I have really tried to like FB because I have many friends and family members there. But the discussions on FB are not interest based. They are activity based. Unfortunately, I don’t care what your golf score was and what you had for lunch. So I am a full time G+’er now.
Rodrigo Chandia

Dude, I disagree so much with you. I visit G+ several times a day. I find the content engaging and interesting. Hangouts are a killer feature, allowing me to reconnect with friends LIVE I would had otherwise not seen, ever.

And there is no comparison with Facebook, where the content rarely goes beyond vanity posts and religious expression (not to say about Farmville spam).
Jeff Jockisch

Google+ is evolving. For me, its not a ghost town, its a cool industry convention I can visit every day across multiple disciplines.

Best thing I have done for my personal growth, maybe ever.
Bob Calder

If by engagement you mean people “liking” your broadcast, it’s dead over there. Most plussers either ignore of discuss.
Pouyan Motamedi

It’s about quality of the engagement, not just quantity.
Lisa Miller

Apparently the method you used to research this mundane piece is the same you used to test-drive Google Plus. Must say I like the questions at the end, though. At least your technique is consistent, but don’t expect Plussers to do your homework for you. We’re awfully busy creating original content.
yoz

I think the number of comments you got from this post compared to your older posts would give you an idea about how Google+ is doing. It may have much less number of users than Facebook, but a lot of people using it are really passionate about it.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

You are right, it seems to be a different culture which is great and the passion certainly blasted through

S Roberts

Referred here from G+
In the time I have been on Google+, I have met many fascinating people and had extensive conversations on topics I have never seen on Facebook – I use FB still, but just to pop in and keep up with family and acquaintances. I spend far more time on G+ answering comments on my own posts, commenting on others’, and in Hangouts. I have met several G+ers in person and hope to meet several more (having dinner with one next week). I have had more engagement in not-quite a year on G+ than I have from years on Facebook.
Pepito141

G+ may not be right for every one, but it is way better than Facebook (imho). The thing is, it’s right for me. It’s not about comparing numbers of users, posts, or comments – it’s about the freedom to choose. Some people choose coke over Pepsi, some iOS over Android – I like G+ over Facebook. It is not a ghost town to anyone who goes to G+ and finds what they want. I have and so have many other people. Don’t force your views, beliefs, or platforms on me and I promise to do the same.
Jaymoon

I’ll take quality over quantity any day.

…btw, found this post via G+
Tom Moncho

If you don’t use the platform properly, which means not using it like “Twitter” for one thing, you’re going to be disappointed in engagement. It’s not Twitter or Facebook. If that’s what you want, it already exists. Google+ is not a failure because you want to use it the same way you use other sm platforms. It seems as though you didn’t understand G+ from the beginning.
Charles Hogge

I’m going to try and make this comment short and sweet. In the years that I spent engaging on Facebook I have only gained friends that I wouldn’t necessarily call “friends.” In the past year that I have engaged on Google+ I have not only made friends locally and across the world but have even been able to connect with people who are much more willing to react to posts then my “friends” on Facebook.

For instance with the usage of Hangouts and my good friend Chris Yates I have started the Social Sports and Entertainment Show. This show has allowed me to make connections with owners of NBA teams, former athletes, and actors among many other larger names of which I would have never had the opportunity to meet.

I’m not saying that these people are not on Facebook as well but the ability to connect with these people on Facebook in the way that I have connected with them on Google+ would be extremely difficult. Through our shows usage of the Hangout concept we have facilitated many relationships from Twitter and Facebook into expanding to a degree that those people thought was never possible.
Flex

Mike Elgan sent me. Def not a ghost town, but used for slightly different purposes than Facebook or Twitter. I use Google+ as a news source, a way to follow some interesting people and hear what they have to say, and a way to share unique content with a select group of my friends and family.
Solomon ShantzKreutzKamp

google plus let’s you find who or what you’re looking for, facebook shove irrelevant information in your face.
Kaye Boylan

I like google plus. I think my timing on google+ vs facebook is the opposite of what your blog post has. Of course, that’s just me.
Mark Gilchrist

G+ is great, same as many others find, the more you put in the more you get out.
Anthony Smith

Google+ gives the user more flexibility to share to a small group. Research like this likely can’t mine true engagement of these shares. I tend to look at facebook to see what my friends are doing, but use Google+ to keep up with going on with all other communities / groups / interest areas. So, I don’t even think it’s a fair comparison.
Brian Chu

If you’re basing “engagement” on number of public posts, you’re kind of missing the point of the circles. I don’t make any of my posts public, because I don’t want to, and G+ allows me to restrict viewability very easily.

I post all the time, and nearly all of my posts get lots of comments and +1s. I get about the same amount of engagement as when I post on facebook. I do post different things to the two networks, because my friends on each are different.
Michael

Mike Elgan sent me here from Google+.
http://twitter.com/TheLocalMethod Albert Hathazi

I am finding the engagement on G+ great. The hangouts are fantastic too.
Dave

Sent from Google+

I can say that if you think it’s not engaging, your using it wrong.
John Butts

Sir, I am pretty sure that you didn’t get the full effect of G+ because you didn’t put much into it. in all honesty, G+ is more of a Social Data- Aggregation engine- which facilitates networking with like- minded individuals. In other words, It connects you to, not only information, like a standard Google search, but it also connects you to the people who happen to have an interest in the same sort of information as you. I would say that I spend less time and effort than most on G+ because my work life is so busy, and I have about 250 people circled, and have been circled by 680+ I read an average of 70 – 100 posts, clicking through on maybe 15 to the news post, or website tied to it. Of those, I will repost maybe 5. That is daily, by the way. Here’s the reason why G+ might seem like a ghost town for people who don’t take the time to make meaningful connections- not much is shared publicly. Although, I certainly see a shift in the last few months towards a more public ecosystem, at first, people would make connections, and share within those circles. And honestly, once you get to a certain rate of connectivity, you almost have more than you can handle- you don’t need to post to the public, because your network is vast, informative and appreciative. Imagine being an engineer, connected to peer group that is vast, and helpful, and comprised of people who know a lot about things that yo’re interested in… Would you feel any need to stand outside and yell your information to the passers by on the street, to get their reactions? I contend that G+ is a similar environment- or was, until the recent influx of users in the last few months. Things have begun to feel more social and open lately, and that’s okay. G+ isn’t a nerd- only club. But I do hope that things never quite manage to get quite as… vapid as a lot of the content on facebook is.
Jaime Hernández-Cordero

The level of discourse in G+ is much higher than Facebook’s, I find posts are closer to my interest instead of simple “what-I-had-for-lunch” updates.
Paul

A Google+ post lead me here. I previously wrote about the Ghost Town Phenomenon:
http://ready2ramble.tumblr.com/post/24197982724/google-ghost-town-phenomenon
Dorna Bandari

G+ Rocks!
http://profiles.google.com/judebrown Jude Brown

I have a small marketing company. We don’t push Google+ because the software we use doesn’t support due to the API being held back. Personally it is the only place I go for real conversations. I look forward to using G+ as a marketing channel as soon as it becomes available.
http://twitter.com/namd88 Nam Dang

I have no friends on G+ (actually I do but they don’t use it at all). However, what I love BEST about G+ is its mobile app with “What’s hot” section. I can’t stand a day without checking this section since there are so many interesting things out there. It’s kinda different from trendings on Twitter (G+ has trending, too) since the contents are not restricted to any particular topic. FB is just like a place for me to meet my friends, but G+ is where I actually enjoy the contents
disgustipated1

The quality of content on Google+ far outweighs the quantity of people on Facebook. When I want to know what all my high school friends are whining about this week, I go to Facebook. When I want updates on real news, thoughtful blog posts and true intellectual discussion, Google+ is there for me.
Vektor@MDQ

G+ rulez
Chetan Patel

So wrong about G+
Robert Hastings

Hello from Google+
Brad Acker

I heard about this blog from G+ buzz. It’s beyond me how anyone — who is a serious user of social media, particularly the robust enhanced level of video interactions among more than just one individual — can say that G+ is a ghost town or that its interactivity levels are low.

I do know that my Klout score (down to 71) drops when i use G+, and that is because Klout does not measure activity in G+ hangouts. How can the most influential social media scoring service not measure the most influential way to influence individuals — Google+ hangouts and G+ hangouts on air? How can a leading consultant, coach, mentor and speaker not realize that Facebook is for fun and games (and not purchases), but G+ is for creative content development and collaboration with people who share your passionate interests.

Googl+ with its integrated robust dashboard of creative tools allows serious collaborators to work together easily and even monetize their activities. Facebook allows you to “like” a brand and show pictures of your latest trip to your friends. OK, so on Facebook, i post cute cat photos and i even clicked that i LIKE the New England Patriots. Is that going to make me buy an overpriced Tom Brady jersey or go to Gillette Stadium: NO!

Do i get insulted when the COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, encourages me to go to the Coca-Cola page and LIKE it so that the Coke page can reach x millions of total “likes”? YES! Coke is a sugary, poisonous drink — and why is a Facebook executive trying to rally users to LIKE such a product???

Zuckerberg’s vision for Facebook was to be the best college directory there ever was and what that looked like he had little idea (that’s a paraphrase of his statement from a few years back). I’d say that sums up Facebook’s current situation — it’s a pretty good college directory and apparently a place to go to play games and trade cat photos. There may be close to a billion users on Facebook (the way Facebook counts), but they are far too distracted to get the attention of brands.

People go to Amazon, iTunes, or Google Play to buy products. They go to Facebook to tell their friends what a beautiful sunset they just witnessed (and post a photo or video about it). I imagine Facebook will continue to be a great place for fun, friends, and family to have “high levels of engagement” by tweeting to each other or by sending “telegraphs” in little text boxes (what century is that technology from?). But i need to earn a living, so i’m spending more time on Google+ finding new friends that i want to work with to build a new collaborative future around shared passionate interests. And there is no better way to build new career and friend relationships than via Google+ hangouts and Google’s collaborative tools.

I had reached my limit of 5K friends on Facebook when i started using Google+. Quickly, i realized that i did not have 5K friends on Facebook (I had to admit that Facebook turned me into a friend whore, haha). G+ taught me that i only have a handful of inner circle friends and the rest are collaborators, colleagues, associates, and strangers (among other categories). So i started to let my Facebook friend count go down (through attrition and friends closing their Facebook accounts to move to G+). I realized that Facebook’s new sharing policies were bombarding me with useless information, and i thought the only way out was to get my friend count down. It dropped about 500. Then, suddenly, Facebook added back 500 friends to take my account to almost 5,400 friends. I’m sick of Facebook unilaterally doing things that i don’t want.

Facebook now seems desperate to make money and has lined up bloggers to spread its message about “driving actions.” The only action Facebook has driven me to do is to spend more time on Google+, where i find the quality of engagement to be much higher than on Facebook. Facebook is a place where people go to “tweet” to each other inside its tall-walled garden, and Facebook is so worried about people leaving that it puts up fraudulent warning messages when you try to visit another site. I’d recommend that people take a walk outside the tall walls of Facebook to see how beautiful it is outside. Of course, you can stay inside and be subjected to Facebook’s brand-driving strategies — like putting up underwear ads with your baby photos.
Do your homework

I am starting to wonder if informed bloggers are really informed? Google+ was never designed for users to be bombarded with Farmville adds and updates about people you have not spoken with for 10 years. The whole premise is that you can access and share the information that you want to with the people you want to share it with.
Terry Poulin

I use G+ and it’s replaced both my blog, RSS, and my Facebook. Honestly, I’ve found much more interaction with people on G+ than Facebook, even among friends.

Importantly to me, it’s an awesome way to consume and share content that interests me, in ways that RSS feeds just don’t seem to offer. I can even have my G+ entries reposted to Twitter and Facebook, lol.
Ben Zaitz

Folks up above said things very well re: engagement and getting out of it what you put into it, and many other well thought out points as well.

For me personally, G+ has changed my life for the better professionally and personally. The folks I have met here that I now consider friends are amazing and the knowledge I have gained from just reading and absorbing on here has changed the path of my career.

I urge you to spend some time interacting. There will be a moment when it clicks, as there was for me, and you won’t be able to turn back after that.

Good luck, and cheers!

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks Ben.

Ramindu Deshapriya

In my experience, Google+ has allowed MORE interactivity than Facebook did. For example, I had the chance to interact with one of my favorite bands, Opeth, on G+ rather than on Facebook because on Facebook I would’ve simply been ignored as just another ‘link-poster’. On G+, the general feeling is that content is meaningful, so the admin of the Opeth page on G+ answered my posts promptly. So I would have to say that your infographics are based on the wrong data. I think you’ve captured the differences between Facebook and G+ nicely, but you haven’t grasped where the user interaction on G+ lies.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Yes the two platforms have different cultures and that is very apparent. Great to have diversity.

Deyanira Villalta

You’re not using it right. You can’t just be passive in your posts. You give what you get. If you’re not getting the level of engagement that you want, then you aren’t giving other G+ users enough. It’s like saying something dull at a party… how many people will then in turn interact w/ you and continue the conversation…
Juan

I’m sure many others have already said, but I disagree with your assessment. Though I get more responses from my Facebook account I still prefer G+ in terms of quality of content shared and over all expirence. Most of my FB friends that haven’t moved over are usually family members that barely know how to use a computer or those that believe the same false assumption that G+ is a “ghost town.” Either way I’m sticking with G+.

Props go to +Mike Eglan for directing me here.
http://www.sigmabizlearning.com/ Jamie Gorman

Jeff,
In a post earlier this week with a similar title I listed 3 reasons I think Google+ will take significant market share based on how it affects search. In short…Google+ enhances SEO rank and click through….companies reallize this….companies do giveaways for me to join their circle or +1 instead of Like….when it comes to online marketing, search still rules. Also, Google doesn’t need the + for their business model, all they need to do is use it to make search better and rake in the ad dollars.
Jamie

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Yes Google+ is vital for Google to continue to capture social signals and continue to make its search relevant for a social web.

Jude Limus

G+ gives a better user experience compared to other social media networks, fantastic UI (needs some improvement), smooth integration with other Google products which WE ALL USE, works flawlessly with Android devices, and the best of all, void of facebook nuisance (we all know what they are..)
Gabriel Castañeda

Goggle+ is definatly not a ghost town. I log on way to G+ may more than I do Facebook. I like it it gives me an inside glimpse of what people are talking and what is going on in the world. Facebook is a vain self-centered cesspool of worthless posts about events in peoples lives. Plus the whole friction-less sharing thing and the fact that my friends have more control over my privacy are what really turned me off to Facebook. I want to know whats going on in the world. I want to find amazing articles, ideas and pictures. For that, I go to Google+
Graham McGregor

I would refer you to a post by Mike Elgan
https://plus.google.com/u/0/113117251731252114390/posts/MHwitt5oMyw
We’re engaged with Google+, believe me, we are
Johnathan Mc Bride

Google is wide open strictly because the mass flow of rejects haven’t shown up and thats right fucking fine. Once it becomes trendy and the uneducated, thoughtless, walmart-wish-they-knew-what- saks-fifth-ave is; show up, it will become trash like Facebook (dullbook) Yahoo, Myspace and all the other flopped servers wrecked by porn, poor account loser Americans with little or no education.
Otherwise your blog is dead on accurate. (opinion) Its just that simple.
Gabriel Bousquet

I have found the engagement and level of conversation much better on Google+ then on Facebook. Hangouts are amazing and the ecosystem is easy to use. It’s useful for both personal and business.
Jaromad

G+ is a much better product, and I find it much more satisfying to use, but it just hasn’t attracted enough of my friends from me to ditch FB altogether, even after a 6 month hiatus from FB.
Ashwin Venkat

stand out feature of FB- FB ads !!??!!??!!??!!?? give me a god damn break! those ads are the most retarded, annoying and down right irrelevant. i go to fb to check on what my friends are up to, i dont wanna be irritated by damn ads ! ( i was in my college group in FB and thr was an ads for high heel boots – how lame is that ). the ads are one of the main reason i quit FB! i like the fact that there are no ads in google+ ( at least yet)..

the Google + crowd are, i think, more advanced, sophisticated, and superior than the FB crowd. So u gotta try harder and be more original to get more attention!
moragos

lately I find myself spending more and more time in Google+ and less time on Facebook and any other site. G+ is really turning out to be my RSS-reader, blogs network and basically it is where I go to learn new and intersting stuff.

Facebook is where i go to… “Like”, or post to a specific person which doesn’t have G+
Nagendra Babu Gattu

I support G+ , here you get what you want
Alan Berman

In general, I find that the “engagement” levels on FB, while they may be more numerous are generally of a far lesser quality. On G+ you will find multi-paragraph responses with reasoned out arguments or insights. On FB you’ll get a fragment of a sentence consisting largely of shorthand netspeak.

If you’re just going for sheer numbers, stick with FB. If you want active discussion, G+.
Dena Coe

no we are not a ghost town Jeff….Lol!

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

What an enormous reaction… my comment system almost had a meltdown!

Fufnet

G+ far superior than other social networks
Nihar Shah

Jeff: I think your assessment that G+ is a Ghost Town is wrong. You need to circle the right ppl to get the contents in your feed. You can read multiple ways Mike Elgan has posted to do so. Check it out. You will love it!

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

I asked a question based upon my experience and I had a few replies (nearly 400) which was awesome!

http://www.reschat.dk/ Halfdan Reschat

I’ve never gotten the high levels of engagement I get on Google+ anywhere before. Not on Facebook, not on Twitter, not on Tumblr, not on Pinterest, not on YouTube, not on Dailybooth, or on any other online community.

As many others have mentioned, then you get out of Google+ what you put in. This is true for a large part – but at times you given get far more out of Google+ than you put in. This begins to happen when you’ve spent a lot of time engaging some of the same people many times and begin to become friends with them. Google+ still offers the usual great engagement you get from random strangers with interesting stuff to say – both on your own posts as well as others’ posts – but Google+ also connects you with a long range of interesting, kind, and overall amazing people, whom you in time become great friends with.

I can honestly say that my time spent on Google+ is my best invested online time. I’ve had so incredibly many great times interacting with all sorts of strangers as well as people I now call my friends. I’ve been part of long, elaborate, intellectual discussions. I’ve been part of interesting, fun, and challenging competitions. I’ve been part of completely weird and completely hilarious abstract long-running jokes. I’ve been part of intimate conversations with smaller groups of people about more personal and private matters. I’ve been part of attempts at helping individuals through crowdsourcing. I’ve been part of so much amazing stuff which I am so very thankful for.

I am a part of Google+ and Google+ is a part of me.
http://www.reschat.dk/ Halfdan Reschat

My long comment about how much greatness I’ve gotten out of Google+ was for some reason removed due to “abuse reports,” so I’m posting this comment to check if the same thing happens again.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

There were so many comments I couldn’t keep up with the moderation.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=717028149 Maxx Agerkvist

See, this is what happens on G+ rather then FB. Now I have homework. Rigth now I don’t have to time to digest your article here, but from I brief review, link and comment on G+ I understand I need to well write a comment. Scrolling down your article seeking the comment lines I understand why. This effect is because the remark pointing to you in the first place is in fact accurate. I need to know the content of this text. And the person telling me knows this. Alternative to FB, where 90% of my pointers from people I befriend are links to the lastest FarmVille or whatever’s being played these days. (Yes, I continuesly block them)
Adam Garcia

Just a thought…has anyone seen this about Facebook: http://news.yahoo.com/end-facebook-kill-king-social-103924073.html
http://twitter.com/onlineExistence onlineExistence

Wow lots of people disagreeing with the content of this blog post, however I have to say that from a digital marketing point of view, I do tend to agree with a lot of Jeff’s points. Google+ does seem to be influenced largely by the Google effect
We are setting some of our clients up with Goole+ accounts, but mainly because of the positive impact on SEO – more so than generating engagement/driving traffic to websites.
It may be useful for personal accounts, especially if people are looking for something that is a bit more involved than FB, but I am yet to be convinced of any major value for company pages…

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks for the comment and it has been a very interesting to watch the interaction unfold to say the least. I only asked a question and I received lots of answers!

http://www.brickmarketing.com/ Nick Stamoulis

It’s true that you get out of G+ what you put into it. It’s become more of a niche community as opposed to Facebook. There’s nothing wrong with that. You just need to take it for what it is.
Rolf Hansen

If you need Google in your marketing strategy, you will also need to be active on G+, maybe not now, but in the future.
Google search and G+ is not two seperate things, but is combined more and more, and for that reason, i believe that G+ will be more important for marketing than FB at some point.
crvdmedia

If you don’t put in the time to learn why G+ is awesome, why would you take the time to write a long post with infographics about how lame it is?

G+ is an amazing platform. I’ve found some of the best content and brightest people over there. It’s a shame so many people are quick to rule it a “ghost town” because they don’t know how to use it.
illuminata b

It doesn’t drive traffic to your site because it really makes you just want to interact with other Google + users. It really only gives you back what you put into it so leaving Google + to do something else is counterintuitive – I have a surprising number of people following me. It is SO time consuming to read posts from other people that I really only engage for any length once a week or so. I tried 3 different times to be on Facebook and absolutely HATED it so much I deleted my account within 24 hours each time even though my entire family and all my in-laws are on Facebook. I used Myspace until Fox bought it and I even tried Friendster back in the day. Google + doesn’t irritate me. The user controls what happens with it and the user has to seek out things to look at (using the What’s Hot feature is a great way to find people and posters to expand your circles). I also +1 everything I think other people should read. The big deal feature should be hangouts but you can see that they are very poorly attended – better notification features might work here. I also prefer to spend my internet time reading the news – some news orgs are on the stream but the Google News feature is superior to the stream for this purpose.
http://www.mycruisetravelpictures.com/ Sunish Sebastian

I used Facebook because there wasn’t another social networking site around and everyone moved to FB from MySpace. I ditched Facebook as it feeds the nonsense of my so called friends. I found your blog post through Google+ and if I was still using FB, I wouldn’t have been here.
Davi Miyake dos Santos

Interesting to notice that here the best posts are from G+ users. Jeff is missing the point….

I am also a G+ fan, long life to G+!
Mark Prasek

For me, FB is still the go-to site. However, I do like G+ more because of the circles. I look forward to the day when I can drop FB. I’m guessing that now FB is going to have to evolve somehow in order to turn a real profit. If true, this could make G+ more attractive to mainstream users.
Michele Price

Laughing really loud as I see you have 393 comments and you ask about engagement and G+. You have enough comments here to keep you writing blog post for a while Jeff. Does that answer your question.

I am also starting to get annoyed with facebook and even twitter from the perspective that I want to build deeper conversations. Facebook limits who I see and who sees me and I do not need a relationship police.

Twitter while I love it, is starting to annoy from the perspective that so many folks are using it to drop links and not talk – it’s morphing into “lost that loving feeling for me.”

G+ on the other hand has been patient – just like twitter was in the beginning when NO ONE thought it was valuable and look at how many engage there now.

So who do you want to engage with is the better question? Find the appropriate platform.

If you just want folks who look up to you and adore your content – then maybe G+ is not the place for you, as the more advance critical thinkers are there – they can teach a lot of the content you post.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Hi Michelle I do indeed have enough content here for 10 blog posts. Yes, each social network has its own strengths, audience and obviously very “passionate” tribes. I think this blog post on Google+ has revealed its “lovers” Great to see

mk

google+ is the best social network I’ve seen. The engagement level is very high if you follow interesting people.
http://profiles.google.com/weaver.thomasj Thomas Weaver

Maybe you should work on having better posts. I know for myself, I left facebook to get away from poor quality content and those who like it.
Greg

I deleted all my friends from fb and stopped using it altogether half a year or so ago. Security, privacy and corporate personality were factors. Fb cares about money, not users. That’s apparent. A high level even said fb viewed sharing user info w/big bro as an opportunity for them. Contrast that w/Google!

Fb blathered me with mindless drivel. They leaked personal info several times due to bugs and bad design, and the last time they did that to me was the final straw.

I found it much more easy and quick on G+ to find people w/similar interests, and it makes it easy to only see what i want when i want. I can see stuff from anybody if they allow it, w/o all that “friend” and “unfriend” crap. I can pay more attention to the streams i want to, and look at the others when i have the time.

G+ works quite nicely for me, tyvm!
http://pixelmatortutorials.net PMtuts

A bit of a problem that Google+ has is that it came too late. Facebook was already well established and with almost everybody of your fellow-sheep using Facebook it would be un-sheep like to isolate yourself on the better Google+. It’s like VHS and Betamax. Betamax is better but everybody is using VHS so we follow the rest of the herd.
greeeg

Wth? I spent time and effort giving you information and my post vanished as soon as i sent it.
http://www.facebook.com/GaryLScott Gary L Scott

Facebook is great. I can keep up with all the coming and going of my friends and families with the click of a mouse button. But in the end, G+ is where I go when I want to be intellectually challenged.

The average post on G+ far more interesting than the best posts I see on Facebook
Kashif

Google plus is one of the best social network ever invented… It is an open network designed to facilitate conversation…. It brings together like minded people together eveb if you dont know them personally…google plus rocks
Wes Alvaro

Checking in from G+

On behalf of the rest of the community, please don’t perpetuate lame statistics.
Bernie Williams

I came here from a Google.+ post.. and looking at those stats Google+ looks to be a winner to me already. Rather than clicking ‘Like’ people are taking time to post information. 100 MLN still posting from 170 MLN! I like those odds! Give it time!
Pingback: En lui-même ce n'est qu'un énième article comparant Google+ et Facebook…
LorenzoFontana

Thank you Jeff!
Pingback: Links for June 16, 2012 « Andrzej's Links
Scott

I rarely use either (three times a month?) but service. But when I do, I find Google+ has more of the people that I feel like following.
Trisha Liu

Greetings from a Google+’er. Seen via Mike Elgan and Chris Brogan. I love Google+. It is like Twitter, but without the 140 character limit, and with threading. The reason I love both Twitter and G+ is because of the interesting people I get to follow, conversations and relationships I have built. Online life *is* real life.
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Carla Plouin

Google+ allows me to feed my curiosity on business topic and hobbies… FB simply keeps me in touch with friends. I use them very differently and as for a ghost town… you probably refer to myspace!
Timothy Lauzon

I still loathe timeline, that in and of itself has soured my FB experience.
Plus, I’d much rather see pics and vids than likes and status updates!!!

I heard this before I think it’s perfect, FB is for connecting with friends and G+ for those that share the same interests. You can’t make friends with FB! “Do you know this person?”….”DO you REALLY know this person”. They make it insanely difficult to add friends….kind weird for a SOCIAL network is it not?

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Then two social networks are similar but also very different and they are attracting different tribes. I will be curious to see how it unfolds over time.

Pingback: 3 Google+ Power Users Reveal their Secrets | Jeffbullas's Blog
http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

It seems to be building some serious momentum!
http://www.facebook.com/therealaaronwood Aaron Wood

Dear Jeff,

You only got this much interaction on this post because Mike Elgan ordered his minions to come assault you.

Hope you continue to see great traffic from Pinterest. I think that’s a great site!

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks Aaron for the assault, luckily I had upgraded my server to a full dedicated server in preparation

Pingback: Infografic – Facebook vs Google+ — REsearch. REact. REfresh.
Jaana Nyström

For a social media professional and blogger having under 9000 people to follow or circle one is very, very little indeed. I’m a nobody from Finland with an umlaut and a double vowel to my name, at this moment followed by over 51000 people.

I think you’re doing something wrong Jeff and I can show you what it is.
Let’s take a look at your posts in a Timeline, with most popular ones first.
If you scroll down a bit you’ll just see linkdumps. Very boring or what? How do these Twitteresque posts entice anyone to read them or even to interact?

http://www.googleplussuomi.com/timelinetest.php?googleid=109167101392398799057&sort=best

Your profile page is also very plain, there’s nothing there to attract attention or what do you think? Why would I circle you, especially if I don’t know your background?

Interaction and engagement are key words on Google+.
It has evolved away from Twitter and Facebook, the users want more than the traditional force-feeding of your own stuff.
Try a different approach and I’m sure you’ll notice a change. But not overnight… Wishing you a better Google+ experience!

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Thanks Jaana for the feedback. Google+ has not been a focus for me and it all comes down to time. It will certainly be attracting more of my attention in the future. Like anything it all takes time. You do indeed get back what you put in.

theotherguy

G+ brought me here.
Alternate Jones

Since Day 1 of Google+ I have shared more than a 1000 posts to my private circles. How do you measure true engagement if you can’t measure private posts ?

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Yes, It’s is a visibility and measurement challenge!

CCA International

Google+ has lost its initial purpose a little bit and now its being used for a vast type of purposes that were not thought of initially. We have managed to find other alternatives however as we deal in Social Media and are experts in this subject. We have also found out that Google+ is not the only way to promote a website or blog as we have found when we created our blog.

For more information about us feel free to visit our blog at: http://ccadgc.wordpress.com/.
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ozio media

Google+ has failed to compete with Facebook for membership, engagement and endurance of the interest of its users. While it doesn’t necessarily drive traffic directly to a blog, because Google is now factoring Google+ links into its search algorithm, Google+ has become a search marketing tool rather than a social media marketing option.
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http://www.facebook.com/kiron.khan.10 Kiron Khan

This has also been my experience.I now spend more time on g+ because it
is more interesting. FB is for checking on friends then I’m back to g+
for interests. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Watch-The-Dark-Knight-Rises-Online/395085420539719
Abdul

G+ is more driven and mature place for networking. It is professional like Linkedin and more interactive than Facebook. According to name Facebook brings only new faces of games, activities, people and adverts but G+ is complete way of interaction in any means. Main thing is that on facebook people don’t feel themselve safe and it is viceversa about G. Main thing is that G rules on Android OS which gives a single touch to the complete Gworld. Best Wishes…
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Joe Holland

I have to agree with Jeff. G+’s reaction to criticism is an Irish one, – simply ignore it with a stiff – upper – lip. That’s why I left g+ after trying it out. I’m not on facebook which I consider the social equivalent of Mc Donalds/ Burger King/ Supermac’s if you’re Irish.
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http://twitter.com/teh_aimee aimee whitcroft

I think something that I’ve not seen adequately addressed is this:

Facebook has been going for years and years – it took off far more slowly than Google+ did. Furthermore, many of the people who have all this engagement with each other are ‘friends’, as opposed to Google+, where (for example) many posts are public, so people are engaging in a fashion closer in many respects to Twitter. Additionally I imagine some content on FB may be more personal than public content on Google+, so I wonder whether there’s not an engagement effect there, too…
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Uday DEshmukh

google always rocks
i like google+.
Facebook has lot of fake account
John Henry

Facebook is a great way to read obnoxious posts by people I know and like. Google Plus is a great way to read interesting and engaging things shared by perfect strangers.

http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

Love it!

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Giovanni Cheng

wtf? When was the last time u used G+?? There’s so many features that stand out from Facebook and other social networking sites. The Communities feature beats the whole Facebook. Besides, there’s more intelligent ppl in G+ that in Facebook. In Facebook, their mostly stalkers or assholes. In G+, i get to know more about the world! Sure there are lesser ppl in G+, but these are ppl all over the world and are friendly. Because of the insecurity of Facebook, ppl dont make friends with ppl in other countries or ppl they never met. In G+, Circles are so much better than the Friend list in Facebook. And Google Hangouts beats the Facebook video chat which is based on Skype. G+ has so much more privacy. And if ur gonna say Fb has those privacy features now, here’s why. Becuz G+ has better privacy, Facebook does not want anyone to leave their site. So, they are implementing features which are based on G+. The new Photo Sync in Facebook is completely based on G+’s Instant Upload feature which was out when G+ was born. So, G+ is more useful, has a better community, has intelligent ppl whereas Facebook is boring, old, lack privacy, low security and too many stalkers
Giovanni Cheng

*MikeElgan
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http://www.facebook.com/people/Peter-Nelson/561683768 Peter Nelson

My ad-blocking software must be blocking the game notifications because I don’t see them. But here’s the thing about the babies. Where people go wrong with FaceBook is when they exceed their Dunbar Number. Some people get a thousand “friends” or they get “friends” with whom they have scant personal connection. And that’s when the babies turn into noise. So if it’s my sister posting pics of her babies, well those babies are my nieces and nephews, so they’re not noise to me.
Ryan Ng

I get a lot of shares/comments/+1s on Google+ at a ratio of 1:1:5. Could that be a problem?
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http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004664863474 Voodoo Spell

Please forward to Psychic Akha: ( Voodoo Home Of Great Spell) Voodoospellcast@yahoo.com, This Message is to commend you on your accurate and insightful reading you provided for me on 5/2/10. As you became aware of, I had been unemployed for over 18 months and was in desperate need of work. My home was on the edge of foreclosure, with no job prospects on the horizon. Your guidance to go back to school, at first seemed impractical…but I did it anyway. Little did I know at the time that my new job would actually be at the school. As I was enrolling for classes, I also applied for a job at the University…and I got it! I am making great money and doing what I love. I can’t thank you enough. anyone can reach him via the following: Tel: +2347030759636, Voodoospellcast@yahoo.com
SlySteve00
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http://www.yepi250.com/ yepi

Thanks, Mila. very useful !!!

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