Is The Google+ Team Hiding Dismal User Numbers?

EDIT: Please check out Edward Morbius’ response to this post in the comments below.

Many might consider Google+ to be a black sheep among social media networks. Despite claiming to have around 540 million active users, many people feel that Google+ is a ghost town when compared to networks such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Indeed, reports seem to come out regularly stating that only a tiny fraction of Google+ users are actually active on the network.

Google+ leaders insist that the network is thriving, but they also “don’t want to talk about numbers.” According to one blogger, Google is shying away from numbers because they’re much worse than reported.

Many Google+ Profiles Exist, Few Are Used

Blogger Edward Morbius performed a test on January 18 to see whether or not Google has been over-reporting their active user numbers. His process, described in an Ello post, involved analyzing a representative sample of Google+ profile sitemaps. He determined a profile to be “active” if it had made a public post to the network. Public comments and private activity were not considered. What he found was pretty astonishing. Apparently:

• 2.2 billion Google+ profiles exist in total.
• Only 9 percent of all profiles have ever posted anything publicly.
• 37 percent of users’ most recent activity involves a YouTube comment.
• Only 0.3 percent – around 6.6 million users – have publicly posted to Google+ in 2015.

These numbers are not only far below the competitor’s user numbers, they’re also well below what Google reports them to be. Also, if Google+ was not tied to YouTube comments, it seems that it would be even worse off. Morbius points out that, out of the 7,875 profiles that have posted something publicly to Google+, only 24 of them didn’t involve a YouTube comment.

Problems With The Analysis

These findings are pretty damning, but they’re also limited in a few ways. For instance, only one sitemap file out of the available thousands was used to make these assertions. Morbius states that Google+ profiles are randomly placed into each sitemap file and that each file has a generally similar number of profiles contained within it, making one arbitrarily selected file a good representation of all the files as a whole. However, there is a small possibility that the Google+ profiles are not in a random order in these sitemaps. It may also be the case that some sitemaps include drastically different numbers of profiles than were in the single analyzed file.

It could also be argued that public posts are not necessarily the best indicator of whether or not a user is active. Taking private activity, comments, +1s and similar actions into account could reveal that many more people are active on the network than this analysis suggests.

What This Means For Marketers

Google+ has recently been going through many changes that indicate a decline in user activity. Regardless of the validity of Morbius’s research, his findings probably echo a feeling you’ve had if you’ve spent any time on the network recently: it just doesn’t seem like Google+ has 540 million active users. The network feels slow-paced and dormant.

With all that said, though, it still doesn’t seem like companies should abandon their Google+ profiles. While it hasn’t been explicitly stated by Google, it’s assumed by many that actively taking part in Google+ is good for showing up in search results. It also seems to help enhance the appearance of your company’s knowledge graph and local search results, especially if users have taken the time to review your business on Google. Also, even if there really are only six million active users on Google+, that’s still a huge opportunity for small business to generate some leads – as long as their target demographics use Google+.

What do you think? Do the findings from this blogger have any merit? Is Google+ simply not worth the time?