How Big is Google+?

I’m not convinced, based on anecdotal evidence but nothing more, by stories like these that Google+ is gaining on Facebook and overtaking twitter:

But how to measure it? It’s not easy.

One way, I figured, was to look at the most popular pages/profiles on the three services and compare them. This wouldn’t be perfect, but I thought would be as good an indicator as any at how mainstream Google+ had gotten, both in terms of followers of the main kinds of people, things and products popular on other services, but also indicative of how those brands/people felt about Google+. It might also reveal whether Google+ is attracting a different kind of person/product/brand/interest.

Of course, it also doesn’t say a lot of things, Maybe the tail is a different shape on Google+. Maybe the layout of Google+ doesn’t so easily lend itself to following/liking/adding to circling/+ing pages. But it kind of does: in fact, Google+ is baked into so much other Google stuff these days that it’s hard not to like, as it were, pages, comments, stuff. I’d argue that it’s easier to do that.

So I went ahead, selecting the top 20 pages on each according to SocialBakers. Most were celebrities, of course, and most overlapped — meaning they featured on more than one service. If they only featured on one, I dumped them (eg ‘Facebook for every phone’ is massive, 274 million Likes, but not really relevant to this exercise.)

My conclusion in short: Google+ is way behind both Facebook and Twitter. No way is it getting close, at least based on this metric. (And only this metric, so far.)

My longer conclusion:

of the 48 profiles measured, only 8 were more popular on Google+ than on Facebook.
of the 48 profiles measured, only 9 were more popular on Google+ than on Twitter.
These includes photographer Thomas Hawk, Google’s Vic Gundotra and Larry Page, Richard Branson and, Hugh Jackson. A motley group.
Most mainstream celebs had way more followers on Twitter than Google+:

Britney Spears (4x)
Bruno Mars (9x)
Cristiano Ronaldo (7x)
Justin Timberlake (34x)

Most mainstream celebs had way more followers on Facebook than Google+:

Barack Obama (12x)
Beyonce (1,774x)
Britney Spears (4x)
Bruno Mars (20x)
Cristiano Ronaldo (22)
Kim Kardashian (7x)
Lady Gaga (8x)
Usher (8x)

Quite a few celebrities don’t seem to have bothered with Google+ at all, as far as I can see.

Eminem
AKON
Beyonce
Jennifer Lopez
Justin Bieber
Katy Perry
Linkin Park
Nicki Minaj
P!nk

Even those who score big on Google+ score bigger on other services. Here’s Google+’s Top 4 :

Lady Gaga – 8x as many fans on Facebook, 5x on Twitter
Britney Spears – 4x on Facebook and Twitter
David Beckham – 5x on Facebook, but negligible on Twitter (unless you count his wife)
Snoop Dogg – 5x on Facebook, 2x on Twitter

Although it may not mean much, adding together all the likes/followers etc for the 48 profiles counted, the totals convey, I suspect, a pretty good idea of the difference in popularity:

Facebook: 1.6 billion
Twitter: 612 million
Google+: 130 million

The number of likes (well, pluses/circles) that would get you top spot on Google+ — 7.3 million — would only rank you about 600th on Facebook (Oasis, say, or Cuddling.)
Another thing to do might be to measure the activity on these pages — when last uploaded, likes/retweets etc — but that’s for another day.

This is just a personal project, and not affiliated with my employer. I’d welcome thoughts and insights which help hone this approach, or ditch it in favour of a better one.

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