Interesting article. I’m not sure that I agree with the hypothesis that one of the factors behind the decline in Google+ activity is that people in general are reaching their saturation point with all things social media…
I’m still using Google+ more than ever and have pretty much stopped using twitter on a regular basis as a consequence yet it hasn’t changed my Facebook usage at all. I really don’t think it should be compared to Facebook and if it were compared to twitter there would be far less doom and gloom articles about its usage levels.
What do you think?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikamorphy/2012/03/03/dear-google-its-not-you-its-us/
Adrian Farouk
Group Strategy Director
On the one hand, this article claims that Google+ is losing its users on the basis of a decline in “time spent on site”. Then it claims the reason for this is because social has hit a saturation point, based on “number of new users on Facebook”. The article doesn’t show how these two distinct metrics are linked, it just jumps to a conclusion. Personally I think the real reason “time spent on site” on G+ is in decline because it is still generic and hasn’t found a niche – is it a competitor to FB? To Twitter? To LinkedIn? These social networks all serve niche interests for a user, and hence while the signup rates may be slowing, the engagement levels on these networks continue to grow. For now, the point is that Google doesn’t care about time spent on site… the metric they need in order to drive Adwords revenue is raw number of signups, which has grown healthily. As this uptake starts to slow, rest assured Google will launch phase 2 of G+, ie. getting people engaged by finding and owning a niche. Their end goal will be to elicit engagement from users in a way that tells Google more about them as a person so that they can serve more accurate ads to them. Always remember, Google is in the paid ad business, not the social networking business. They didn’t get where they are without planning, I’d be surprised if they don’t have something up their sleeve.