How Google+ Messed Up Its Popularity

In social media optimization

Do you love Google+ and keep making comments like “when will #Facebook be deleted from the internet?” It’s time to think again as your dream of Google dominance is as faaaaaaaaaaaaaar from being true as the F and R are. In a recent survey, it came out that people spend 135 times more time on Facebook than on Google+. More horrible is the actual value. On an average, people spend 3 minutes in a month on Google+. (Vic Gundotra must be aware of it I guess.) A month of 30 days has 43200 minutes, fyki.

What Google+ did wrong?

What Google+ did wrong?

Even Tumblr and Pinterest (this one especially is yet to make any sense to me personally) have 30 times better score than Google+.  Twitter, which requires least time, engages people 7 times more than Google+. LinkedIn is there, I wonder why Orkut or MySpace didn’t make the chart.

Google is pushing very hard, in fact the moment you have a Google account for any “known to God” reason, you are presented with a fresh Google+ account. By the by, this estimation of Google+ is pretty inaccurate I guess as people stay logged in Google+ when they use android phones or tablets. If we take away those devices, Google+ should have been counted in seconds or milliseconds I guess.

What did Google do wrong? First of all, they ignored Orkut, which was a major hit outside USA. They took no initiative to get those users to Google+. A blunder, I would say. Google could have

  1. Transfer their account to Google+ automatically and redirect them there.
  2. Encourage them to shift to Google+ by keeping some popular concepts like the communities in Google+. (Vic realised it late and now they have this ‘New’ feature called communities in Google+ as well)
  3. Let them bring all their friends and posts (personal and community) to Google plus, as well as shifting the communities to Google+. Some communities in Orkut had half a million fans compared to best communities in Google+ touching 10K barely.

Google did nothing. Google is suffering. Google+ is a deserted place. We just hope it doesn’t die like Google Buzz. On this note, Google must stop copying the leaders. Buzz was a shameless copy of Twitter while Google+ is a carbon copy of Facebook.

They have started this integration of Orkut with Google+ but I just hope they are not a bit too late on this.

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