

Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement - lleims
http://www.fastcompany.com/1837332/exclusive-google-google-plus-ghost-town-weak-engagement-data-rj-metrics-study

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jmillikin
(disclaimer: I work at Google)

It is impossible to make meaningful statements about Google+ user engagement
by looking at only public posts.

In 2012, I've created eighteen public posts, often spaced apart by weeks.
According to my public history, I barely use Google+. In the same time frame,
I've posted hundreds of private posts. My posts are for my friends, and I see
no reason to let random internet people read my posts.

Many of my friends have absolutely _no_ public posts, or maybe one when they
first join saying "well, I'm here". To an outside observer, it looks like they
posted once and left. But if you're in their circles, you'll see that they're
posting often, sometimes up to several times an _hour_.

Unfortunately, the only entity that can provide concrete numbers of active
users is Google itself, and they aren't telling.

~~~
webwanderings
So as a Google employee and by using private posts, you prove that people use
Google+

I am no Google employee and with the same logic, I can prove that people don't
use Google+.

Private Google+ posts are what people call Emails. I have not yet received a
single Google+ private post, nor have I sent any.

~~~
Spakman
Well, I guess there are multiple ways to use Google+ and your way certainly
differs from mine.

I use private posts (limited posts, really) to post to, say, my "developers"
circle. My non-techy friends don't want to read about Ruby interpreter bugs or
the like and it's a way for me not to spam them.

Likewise, my "developers" circle probably aren't interested in reading in-
jokes/links/whatever between my friends and I.

It's definitely not like email for me.

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ben1040
It seems like the strategy (especially given the revised privacy policy) is to
converge every other service so that you're using G+ no matter what.

Google Contacts is now focused on circles, circles show up in Gmail, and you
can control Google Voice activity based on circles. And I imagine this is just
the start.

I wonder if getting people to publicly post is really even on the critical
path for them at all. If they change their services to be circle-centric and
get enough people just to put people in circles, that gives them a ton of
social graph data to mine even without posts.

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kadabra9
I'm always skeptical as to how you can truly, accurately measure engagement on
something like G+ or Facebook. Sure enough, this study only measures "public"
activity. If you're just measuring engagement by how frequently someone posts,
I think that's a bit misleading. As cryptoz and RobAtticus alluded to, I
rarely post to Facebook, but that doesn't at all say I'm not "engaged" through
reading my friends updates, viewing photos, checking out articles they read,
etc. Just because I'm not outspoken (or even narcissitic, ha) enough to post
to Facebook every 5 minutes certainly doesn't mean I'm not engaged with it.

What intrigues me more about the article, is the picture of "waning interest"
in G+. My interest in G+ is certainly fading. I might log in one every week or
two, and even then it's the same routine; I'll log in, see that it's still the
same ghost town it was last week, and then move on.

If I were Google, I'd be much more concerned about keeping people interested
in G+, not focusing on how many posts people make or how many millions of
people have "upgraded" to G+ only to never return.

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lleims
I submitted the story and I also think FastCompany's headline is bogus, but I
wanted to leave it there for others to judge it.

Publishing such a report (and those conclusions) by just looking at public
posts makes no sense at all. No wonder according to the study very few of
those posting public updates never came back. They were probably users trying
the service for the first time and had no people in their circles at that
moment.

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bceagle
I really like Google plus but the reality is that I use it less than Twitter
or Facebook. I think it is only a matter of time, though before it takes off
because they will continue to lower the barrier for entry and look for new
ways to integrate to their other products. If nothing else, one day a lot of
people may be communicating with each other on G+ without even realizing it.

------
DavidAmerland
The study by RJM is fundamentally flawed. It has taken a metric without any
point of reference, accumulated some raw data and made some pretty wild
interpretations from there. I have rebutted it here: <http://goo.gl/nDAVQ>

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RobAtticus
This is just ridiculous. G+ may be a ghost town, but I know than for me and
all of my friends, 99% of our activity is non-public. If Google's goal is to
get a lot of public activity, then yeah, they're not doing so hot. But this
article doesn't do much to convince me that it's actually a ghost town.

~~~
ryanmolden
Google should release numbers around this then if they want to stop articles
like this. I recently signed up for a new GMail account and it automatically
enrolled me in Google+, so I am highly skeptical of their number of new users
metric since they seem to be inflating it by tying unrelated things together.
It may make sense for them to try and tie things together into one cohesive
identity, but it is hard to deny it also conveniently inflates Google+
numbers, at least the only numbers they seem willing to talk about publicly.

~~~
RobAtticus
Sure, I can agree to that. I have a feeling that the numbers aren't good
enough to release. Again, I don't want to imply that I think G+ is as active
as Facebook/Twitter, just that I think the study is pretty much useless. After
all, if I was using my friend group as a metric for how well a product was
doing, Wave would still be alive...

