Google+ not a brand magnet

According to a Google spokeswoman, there are a lot of brand and business engagement on its social network with far reaching social benefits.

However, statistics from March this year clearly indicates users spend more time on other social communities.

Facebookers spend on average six hours per day engaging on the blue community, while Plus has a bounce rate of six minutes and 47 seconds.

“The biggest problem for Google+ is that many more consumers use Twitter and Facebook – and they log in to Facebook for much longer periods,”Reuters reported.

Google+ has maintained an estimated 135 million users from the 500 million setups as gathered over two years since its release.

Facebook is miles ahead with 1.1 billion users and Twitter trailing with 200 million members.

HumanIPO reported yesterday (Monday) on Twitter’s US$10 billion validation as the fastest growing social media site worldwide.  

The research does not, however, include app activity on social media websites.

Informal findings of news agency Reuters revealed 72 of the most 100 valuable global brands in 2012 were present on Google+.

Approximately 40 per cent of these brands are completely inactive or seldom engage, including 17 companies such as Nike and Pepsi which update pages as infrequently as less than a week.

In comparison, Facebook has 87 of the 100 top brands’ interactive participation in online social networking.

Nevertheless, Google+ hangouts are a hit and some brands such as Cadbury and Fiat had experienced success as examples of 100 brands which gained more than one million followers.

Gretchen Howard, global social solution director at Google, said the search engine giant is working to improve according to member requests.

Greg Finn, director of marketing at search engine optimization company Cypress North, said: “Right now, the value isn’t in the network itself, it’s in what it can do for the search results.”