Google+ Gaining Momentum With 55% Increase in Visits Last Month

Last week online statistics agency Experian Hitwise tweeted that the total number of Google+ visits in the US alone had reached more than 49 million in December of last year, apparently it was the sites “biggest month to date”, up by an impressive 55% when compared with the number of visits made by users in November 2011, further proof (if it were needed) of the burgeoning demand when it comes to digital media marketing sites.

Since the inception of Google+, very little has been said about the global popularity of Google’s new social media project by the search engine giant itself, with no official statistics being provided that widely publicise it’s initial success, following the sites launch in June of last year.

In December the “unofficial Google+ statistician” Paul Allen, ran a query associated to surnames that had been used to sign up to the service, in order to identify the number of users logging in to the social networking site, and settled on 62 million following his research; with predictions that the number would climb to 85 million by the beginning of February this year.

Digital business analytics service ComScore also reported that Google+ was home to 65 million users in November; the difference between their study and that of Hitwise being that ComScore, and also Allen, refer to the number of visitors, while Experian Hitwise measured the number of visits to the Google+ site, a more vague indicator of the number do users actually signing up to and using the site on a regular basis.

The speculation from various quarters across the industry indicates that interest in Google’s social media platform is steadily growing; as does the overall impact of digital media marketing on the IT industry.  Although Google+ seems to be enjoying increasing popularity, it is still a long way off proving a serious threat to the likes of Facebook, which boasts over 800 million active users, half a billion of which access the site on a daily basis, and Twitter with a reported 300 million plus users.

According to industry observers cnet, Google has been making a number of changes to a variety of platforms, in order to integrate their social site fully across their existing portfolio, and establish the site as a key component part it’s web offering and digital media marketing platform:

“Google has been integrating Google+ with other technology such as Android, Picasa, Web Albums, Gmail, search, and Reader, using the service to unify Google technology and to cross-promote its products.”

Recent studies conducted by ComScore indicate that social networking is as popular as ever, with an estimated 82% of web users aged fifteen years or over using the net to access social media sites, and almost a fifth of time spent surfing the web is on social networking platforms; making it the most favoured past time globally, and a lucrative market for digital media marketing.

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