The alternative to Facebook winded up getting significantly more users during the last two months of 2011. According to Experian Hitwise, It is still quite far from getting parity with Facebook, but Google+ traffic in the US from November to December surges 55%, a phenomenal growth for the upstart social networking site.
As of November last year, Google+ had a registered population base of around 65 million, just a drop in the Facebook bucket which has more than ten times as many members. But in its modest attempt to become the better alternative to it, Google has registered more than 49 million visits, as tweeted by an Experian analyst the other day. Note that Experian monitors site visits, not users.
Getting surfers to visit your site by the thousands in just a month is already a feat. But leave it to Google+ to attract tens of millions. Never mind that Facebook gets tenfold as many during the same period.
The leading search engine giant has yet to make an official word about Google+ traffic measurements but 3rd party analysts and researchers are more than willing to do it for them. Paul Allen, founder of Family Link and Google’s “unofficial” statistician said that “Google has 62 million users overall in December and predicted 85 million by February 1.” Close to it, ComScore has figured that Google+ had a user population of 65 million in November.
For the record, Facebook enjoys more than 800 million registered users, according to Joanna Shields, managing director for Facebook’s European, Middle East and African operations, speaking at the LeWeb conference held in Paris last month. With such a user statistical profile, Shield adds that Facebook users frequent the site as “Half a billion come back every day.”
Google has been integrating Google+ with other online services such as its search engine, Gmail, Reader, Picasa, and Android gadgets to unify the online social networking experience while promoting its other products across major platforms. It knows too well that in the social networking circles, size and scale matters a lot. After all, the entire exercise is all about connect to as many people who can access the site from anywhere on the planet.
There’s nowhere else for social networking to go but up. ComScore said last December that “Social networking is the most popular online activity worldwide.” The phenomenon currently reaches 82% of netizens aged 15 or older and accounts for almost one-fifth of online time.
