Recently various figures have come out about the growth of Google+.  Just today The Guardian  reports on the network seeing 67 million visitors in November, with 2.7 million of those coming from the UK (the US is the biggest market with close to 15 million visitors).

Meanwhile, Hitwise is shouting about 49 million US visits (as opposed to visitors) in December . And when it comes to actual accounts, Ancestry.com’s founder Paul Allen has been keeping track of the service and estimated that there were 60+ million live as of Christmas.

Yet at the same time, for many of us with Google+ accounts these figures don’t seem to make a great deal of sense.  I suspect I am not untypical in that I’ve created a profile, but after an initial burst of enthusiasm don’t use it very much.  There seems to be a disconnect between raw visitor numbers and engagement and I wanted to see if I could dig into this a little bit more.

• First of all the numbers.  Remember that these figures are monthly and includes someone who might only access the site once.   They don’t measure actual activity.

• 14.7 million US visitors sounds impressive, but a post by Sysomos says that this is actually only a 10% growth since late Sept

• Similarly in November, the LA Times reported on the fact that, despite there being some impressive growth spurts, traffic actually dropped in 11 out of 21 weeks, with fluctuations of 10-20% from one week to the next

• Finally, the Hitwise number for December mentioned above sounds huge.   However, Digital Trends highlights a figure that I think is key.   For the week of 17 December, Hitwise tracked nine million visits.   By comparison, in September, Google+ was managing 15 million visits a week with a much lower user base

Why do articles such as the one in today’s Guardian keep on presenting the big numbers without digging deeper into what those numbers actually mean? I think the article on the Sysomos website has got it right – “people really, really want Google+ to succeed.”

There’s been a lot of talk about the next Facebook, and Google+ has been held up as the most likely candidate.

Google+ isn’t the next Facebook.  It could be the next Twitter

My own view is that Google+ is not a failure in the waiting.   It also isn’t the next Facebook.   Facebook is more dominant in social media than Google is in search.  With Facebook having a 95% share of social media time in the US it just won’t happen – for now.

In fact a better parallel isn’t between Google+ and Facebook, but between Google+ and Twitter.  Sure, the networks are very different but there are a lot of similarities in the growing pains and user profiles of both. There was a time, around 2008/2009 when people also ‘really, really’ wanted Twitter to succeed. Then in 2009 / 2010 the first questions about engagement on Twitter started to appear.

At the time some people compared it to the virtual world Second Life (which attracted an enormous amount of hype in 2007, without the user numbers ever justifying it) .   I predict that in 2012 we’ll see similar stats rolled out about Google+, showing that most accounts are barely active or dormant.

Fast forward to today, and Twitter’s user base is impressive, yet even back in March, the evidence was that a relatively small number of ‘elite’ users – 20k people – were responsible for 50% of activity  Behind a large number of casual users there is a very committed, small but influential ‘core’.

I suspect the same holds true for Google+ And so despite only having 1/3 of Twitter’s numbers (and a much smaller proportion of time), Twitter has consistently punched above its weight in terms of influence.

Case in point – in 2011 it was Twitter and not Facebook that dominated the mainstream news agenda.

Image – Sean MacEntee

Related articles

• Google+ Tops Facebook’s Growth Rate (socialmayonnaise.com)
• How Google+ Is Changing the Web, Even Though No One Wants It To (hubspot.com)
• Hitwise: U.S. Google+ traffic leaps 55 percent in December (news.cnet.com)
• Google+ Posts Strong December Growth Numbers (coated.com)

Hitwise now has the latest UK stats, and visits to Twitter keep on growing.   According to analyst Robin Goad, on Saturday, Twitter accounted for 1 in 184 UK Internet visits online.

The chart above pretty much says it all:   Previously there have been questions about the high level of Twitter churn with various estimates showing that 80%+ of accounts might be dormant.   This however will answer the question I used to hear quite a lot: “yes but my mum in Milton Keynes doesn’t use it.”  (or variations of that)

My answer at the time was usually – she might not use it, but the people who she reads about or watches / listens to do.

Now that answer can be changed again – she might not, but having had Twitter splashed on the front pages of the UK tabloids, she will almost certainly now have some kind of awareness of it.   Indeed, Robin’s post shows that Twitter visitors are becoming more mainstream and are moving closer to the UK population average.

Recently Comscore estimated that Twitter penetration was 12.9% of the UK Internet population.   It will be interesting to see how this changes in light of what has been happening over the past two weeks.

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• ‘CTB’ and the media trust issue (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
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• Super-injunction: Twitter traffic record broken (telegraph.co.uk)
• Twitter’s Super-Duper U.K. Censorship Trouble (techland.time.com)

Check out the chart above, it’s from Hitwise showing the % of UK traffic Apple got from both search and social networks – specifically Facebook.

The spike in the social % and the dip in the search came on the day Beatles content was available to download from iTunes.   And on that day, Hitwise analyst Robin Goad tells us that 1 in every 200 visits that left Facebook went directly to Apple.

Hitwise says that Facebook jumped from being the 86th most popular site to drive traffic to Facebook, to no 20 between 13-20 November.

Related articles

• Apple iTunes Beatles success driven by Facebook not search (weblogs.hitwise.com)
• The Beatles Sell 2,000,000 Songs in Their First Week on iTunes (mashable.com)

Robin makes his observation by pointing out that Facebook’s UK growth rate is starting to slow.   Just like in the US, where last month, Facebook user rates among 18-44 year olds dropped (but grew among over 45s), Facebook saw a slight dip in its UK page view share last month, which could of course be seasonal due to colleges and Universities breaking up for the year.

Facebook does of course have 500 million worldwide users, hence the question of whether it can realistically grow much more.   And of course, it raises the other question of whether it will really ever be replaced (the same question constantly asked of Google in search)?

An interesting piece over on Flowtown says no, giving various reasons from the fact that a lot of people genuinely use it to manage their online lives, the applications market, and the fact that brands and businesses gravitate to it now almost as a default.

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The article was given fairly prominent billing as it goes against the grain of Twitter breaking and helping to develop news.

Instead, Venture Beat reported that Hitwise’s figures showed that “the micro-blogging site comes in at No. 39 on a list of where people go for breaking stories. Surprisingly, Facebook is No. 3 — a second victory for the site, following yesterday’s revelation that it has surpassed Google as the most visited web site in the U.S. Google News.”

Good for Facebook, but as Jay Rosen pointed out the Twitter stats are close to meaningless.   Why?  Because most regular Twitter users no longer access Twitter through the web using a client instead.

The figure below shows that 80%+ of users don’t update via the Twitter website – it was a TwitStat snapshot taken at 7am UK time, but it’s consistent with what TwitStat showed during the day yesterday (and peak US log-in times).

It also tallies in with figures published in Tech Crunch 1+ year ago, which showed web access at 32% – and in the past year the Twitter market has both matured more, Twitter clients themselves have become better known, and smartphone usage has increased.

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28% of Americans say that social media has influenced their holiday purchases

Metrics firm Comscore (source Marketing Charts) carried out a study to show that during the first 36 days of the Christmas shopping season in the US, during which consumers spent $16 billion, 28% were influenced by social media when buying. The biggest source of influence we reading a consumer generated review of a product (including blog posts) at 13%.

At the same time, the effectiveness of using Twitter feeds to blast out special offers and promotions could be called into question from the stat that only 5% bought after following a company’s Twitter feed to find out about special deals.

“Cyber Monday” (UK) moves closer to Christmas
According to Hitwise, ‘Cyber Monday’, the day when online retailers are at their busiest, moved a week closer to Christmas this year. In 2008 it was on 30 November / 1 December, this year it shifted to 7 / 8 December.

Hitwise says that larger online retailers and department stores were the main beneficiaries of later Christmas shopping. Amazon in particular saw its market share of visits increase from 6.1 to 8.2%. M&S and John Lewis similarly featured in the top ten.

According to Hitwise analyst Robin Goad, the trend towards established brands and also ones with a high street presence “clearly illustrates a preference for multiple delivery and dispatch options.” In other words, we’re tending towards retailers that offer a mixture of trust and convenience.

Last week it was rumoured that Amazon is eyeing up High Street locations around the UK, at a time when Borders books has gone into administration.

Latest Facebook stats for Europe
Inside Facebook has the latest Facebook figures for November, showing that in Europe it now reaches 112 million monthly active users. As before, the UK is by far Facebook’s biggest market with 23,009.220 users, which gives it 37.6% penetration.

Inside Facebook points out the social network’s growth rate is however slowing. This comes as Facebook announced 350 million users globally, which raises the question of whether it’s reaching saturation levels.

4/5 video viewers leave a stream if it “buffers”
Better make sure your site and stream has the right bandwidth as if there is any kind of glitch, the vast majority of users will leave.

Tubemogul looked at 192 million video streams (source New Tee Vee) across 14 days and found that more than 81% of viewers will leave if it “rebutters.” In other words, most viewers won’t hang around for a video to reload but will go and find something else to do with their time.

According to Tubemogul, that’s particularly significant for advertisers who’ve invested in ‘post rolls’, ads that run at an end of a clip. Chances are most people will never see them.

A day in the life of the Internet
This killer graphic was featured on NextWeb, visualising a day in the life of the Internet. Apparently we send 210 billion emails a day, post five million tweets and post 900,000 new blog articles.

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Researchers looked at search habits of 72 participants engaging in 426 tasks.   Rather than search being used to find out new stuff, search engines were “primarily used for fact checking users’ own internal knowledge.”   According to the academics, that means that search is actually part of our own internal learning process.

Hence the fears about students for example getting lazy and just using Google rather than their brains to find out answers might be incorrect.  Instead, Google, Bing et al support “higher level information needs”, i.e to increase the chances that we get the right answer and to put detail on things we already know.

That makes sense if you look at how search habits are evolving, in particular lengthening.   Last week Hitwise’s Asia-Pacific analyst Alan Long put out a post on lengthening search terms.   Something that Hitwise says is an international trend – one and two word searches have gone down over the past three years and 3+ word searches have gone up.

People already have a fair idea of what they are after when they go to search, hence more specific searches.  As a result, search is as much to validate and build on existing knowledge as to find new one.

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The latest stats about the growth of online video from Hitwise. 1 in 35 UK web visits is now to a video site, compared to 1 in 50 a year ago.

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