Google+ has been growing steadily, and by most accounts it is becoming a true competitor for Facebook. Of course, Facebook has a huge lead on them, and it will be difficult for Google to ever overtake them, but for the time being anyway, Google can be proud to have a strong second place product on their hands. One area where Google is lagging far behind Facebook (and virtually all other popular social sites) is in the amount of traffic driven to other sites.
Facebook leads all other social sites by a considerable amount, and the traffic they drive has been growing at a fairly steady pace. Well behind Facebook, but still above the rest of the competition is Pinterest. They drive a significant amount of traffic to other pages, and for a relatively new site, they are doing quite well. Their growth, however, has been slow over the past year. Next is Twitter, then StumbleUpon, then Reddit, then YouTube, followed by LinkedIn. Finally, at the bottom of this list is Google+.
To make it worse for Google’s social network, the amount of traffic they are sending doesn’t seem to be growing very fast at all. This should be seen as a concern for Google since much of the content posted on social networks is put there by marketers hoping to drive traffic. If Google+ is unable to do that, they will not get nearly as many posts either, which could eventually lead to the death of the network. Of course, Google+ offers a variety of other things such as the authorship status, which marketers like.
It is far too early to count Google+ out as a traffic generating tool, but if you’re trying to figure out where to put your marketing efforts, Google+ won’t be attracting many people for a while to come.
This data is all from the recently published annual report from Sharaholic, which can be seen HERE.
