Nobody Is Using Google+
uk.businessinsider.com
uk.businessinsider.com
Methods: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ
(linked in the article)
Pastebin of the 4215 "active" profiles sampled for activity. In quotes as some actually aren't though they passed my initial regex screen.
Source for the sitemaps is the G+ robots.txt file:
90-9-1 rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) http://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/
Random sampling and error size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sample http://www.randomsampling.org/
An independent estimate for number of G+ profiles, team includes a present Google Employee (per his G+ profile page). Validates my 2.2 billion number (via Thomas E. Hanna on G+):
Social media technologies are about as remarkable as email accounts in the year 2015. And switching to G+ is the social media equivalent of switching to hotmail, at least in terms of public perception. And since public perception means a lot in a world where you have about 30 seconds to change minds, the G+ ship sailed several years ago.
Social is hard. Really hard. I've mused on that rap a lot myself.
I have no doubt that G+'s active usage numbers are weaker than Google would like, but it seems like quite the chasmic leap to declare that nobody's using it based on that.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnKkfTN...
Upshot:
The average (mean) publicly active profile has 25 times the views of the mean publicly inactive profile.
34% of non-public profiles show no views at all.
The median views is 693 -- two views per day if the profile's been active for only a year, less if longer.
Follower counts are far lower for publicly non-active profiles. To the 35%ile they have one follower -- for publicly active, that's the 20%ile (overall it's interesting how small follower counts are per profile).
Mean followers for inactives is 6.4, for actives, ten times that -- 66.4.
Yes, that's a weakness of the study (I'm the numbers guy), but it's also what's available. It also allows for direct comparisons with other platforms offering public posting. And in the face of a dearth of quantified metrics from Google, offers a data point.
I use G+, I like G+, it does what I need, Google haven't messed with it too much like FB does all the time.
Use whatever tool you like for the task.
What's with all these articles saying how no one is using G+, I assume they think Google are going to shut it down? Why would they, they can target me and create a profile around me....
Meh.