Google+, “The Avatar Steppe”

Do not invest heavily in marketing on Google’s social network* because it unfortunately looks a lot like the hero of Dino Buzzati’s famous novel: It will never achieve the fame it aspires to.

Blogger Kevin Anderson published a very informative post on the actual usage of Google+ based on data compiled by Edward Morbius**.

Their findings are as follows:

• There are about 2.2 billion Google+ profiles (all profiles created on Gmail, YouTube and other Google services are also registered within Google+).
• About 9% of these 2.2 billion Internet users had any publicly-posted content during the 18 days covered by the analysis, which doesn’t include non-public posts or comments.
• Of those, about 37% had as their most recent activity comments on YouTube videos***, another 8% had profile photo changes.
• Only 6% of active profiles had any post activity.
• Only about half of those posts, 3% of active profiles, weren’t YouTube posts.

Internet users who actually use Google+ thus represent 0.2% or 0.3% of the 2.2 billion profiles that are registered on the social network, or between 4 and 6 million people.

Google’s social network is indeed “the avatar steppe.”

* Unless, of course, you expect the content posted on Google+ to be processed by Google Search’s algorithm.

** Who does use Google+ himself.

*** YouTube is owned by Google and partially integrated with Google+ (same user profiles, joint comments…).