A negative outlook for Google+

I was astonished to see a recent piece of research from Experian that showed how little impact Google+ is making.

According to The 2012 Digital Marketer: Trend and Benchmark Report (a study that is as long on detail as it is in its title), the top 10 social media sites are not what you would expect.

The list is below, but the interesting thing to me was that Google+ is really not making the waves we all thought it would. With 61 million visits in March, it achieved a fraction of Facebook's traffic (7 BILLION in the same period). It is narrowly ahead of MySpace (!) that is hanging on in there with 43m, yet trailing in the wake of Pinterest (104m) and even Tagged.com (72m). No - I hadn't heard of that one either, but it's outperforming Google+. And that got me wondering.


Marketers are sensible enough to know that Google will give search prominence to Google+ posts, and we all flocked towards it. The web was full of posts and whitepapers explaining how to formulate a Google+ strategy.

But all the strategy in the world isn't going to help if it is a ghost town. I wonder how many of the 61 million visits were from marketers, posting stuff in the hope of getting some kind of SEO benefit.

Maybe I'm wrong, but we've already seen Google Wave level out, and Google Buzz quieten down. Maybe there are only negatives in store for Google+?