It has become customary to compare social networks to each other. Immersing ourselves in their statistics is something we all seem to enjoy in order to figure out what our next move should be. Always staying one step ahead of the crowd is of course something every company would like to do since that could potentially mean a lot of exposure and revenue if things are done right. But sometimes things can be interpreted wrong, and before you know it, you’re left in the dust while everyone else is actually following another trail. When Twitter started to gain traction around the world, there were many people who compared it to Facebook in order to estimate Twitter’s impact and following, and today it’s all about Pinterest and of course Google+.
There have been many articles about Google+ published by now, and they all pretty much say the same thing. Google+ is not the huge success that everyone predicted it was going to be. In fact, people are talking about it being a failure on a grand scale. I am not completely comfortable joining them in their judgement because I think Google+ is still too young to be compared to any of the giant social networking services.
Google has even said that they are overwhelmed by the high rate at which people are signing up for new accounts, and even though they continuously release positive data, it seems the world is set on another opinion regardless. So, is Google+ a big failure or are they still putting their darling on the map by adding new and exciting features? Maybe the answer is both.
Judging from the time people spend on Google+ (presented in this infographic called, Google+ R.I.P? created by Browser Media), you might say that it is not exactly successful. In that particular area, they are definitely doing something wrong. On average people stay on Google+ for just 3.3 minutes per month, while they stay on Facebook for 550 minutes per month. That’s not exactly a stellar statistic for Google+, right? But they still have quite a lot of pageviews by raking up about 20 million of them per month.
So where is Google+ really headed? Is it a success, or is it a failure? Statistics usually tell a pretty accurate story; however, with Google+ it’s kind of hard to establish an opinion. It’s on the edge of both, and I could call it either one actually. The service is growing, but maybe not at the rate that Pinterest is. But at any time this could change, depending on what gets implemented and how they decide to play their cards. It is a new service that I know a lot of people are still acclimating themselves to. Just because Pinterest is gaining users faster than any social networking service ever before doesn’t mean that comparing it to Google+ (since they have pretty much the same amount of pageviews now) makes the latter a failure.
If it’s used right, I am sure Google+ can become something that we all can benefit from. I especially like the “hangout” feature they offer. I have never used it myself, but I have seen plenty of footage of it being used, and it is a pretty cool feature to host gatherings and meetings through if you are located in different parts of the world. So to end this article, without having to call it one or the other, I would say that Google+ is a young service that everyone is eager to call either a success or a failure. I will simply have to quote Mark Zuckerberg here and say, “We don’t know yet what it is. We don’t know what it can be.” We’ll have to wait and see. In the end, it is the users who will decide what happens with Google+.
Click Infographic To Enlarge
Via: [visual.ly]
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