Google+'s Surprising "Active" Numbers & Brand Engagement

Earlier in the week I saw surprising news on Mashable: Report: Google+ Brand Posts Get Twice the Engagement of Tweets. In this article it said that 22% of the 60,000 adults studied in the United States visited Google+ within the last month. This was the same number as people who said they use Twitter and more than people reported that they use LinkedIn, Pintrest or Instagram.

That night talking to my boyfriend he said, "well duh. Google makes you use Google+. I have to use Google+ but I don't use Twitter. I'm a perfect example of this statistic."  This made me curious where these numbers were coming from.

First Google made us join Google + to post and comment on YouTube videos. Then Gmail's were adapted into Google+ accounts. These transitions made it impossible to interact on these networks with out a Google+ account and forces engagement with their "social layer". This is where a lot of the "impressive" numbers are coming from for Google+ memberships.
These active numbers also come from the number of people who only use the Hangouts feature, which respectively shouldn't be counted since they are "apps" of Gmail and Google Chat.

Hangouts is the only feature of Google+ that my boyfriend and I use under our Google+ accounts though more recently I also allow my blog posts to be shared on my Google+ account. But that doesn't really make me active... that's why the brand interaction was so surprising to me.

In June 2013, on Google+'s second birthday, it boasted having 500 million users with more than 300 million active users. The earlier quoted study found more than 3 million user interactions with more than 2,500 brand posts. That means Google+ posts scored almost as high as Facebook and received almost twice as much engagement per follower as tweets from these same brands. That's impressive.

I think Google is a brand that people who are loyal to it, respect it and use it well but I am not sure how effective it is to the every day person. These numbers are definitely something to pay attention to and consider into future advertising strategies for brands that try to keep with the trends of Vine, Twitter, Instagram and Pintrest.