At Vertz Marketing we teach marketing trends often throughout Milwaukee and all of Wisconsin to a wide variety of groups including local Chambers of Commerce, trade associations and retail groups. The topic that keeps coming up is their curiosity about Google+, Google’s social media answer to the success of Facebook.
A recent statistic was released from Nielsen that tracked where people spend their time on the internet. As you would expect, Facebook came in number one with the most users (1.11 billion) and the most time spent on their site. The average Facebook user spends about 7 hours per month on the Facebook site. What we found interesting, but really not that surprising is the average user of Google+ spent 6 minutes and 47 seconds on the site in March of 2013. That’s right, approximately 7 hours per month for Facebook and just 6 minutes, 47 seconds FOR THE WHOLE MONTH ON GOOGLE PLUS!
With so little time or attention being given by consumers to Google+, why be on it? We’ve been giving the same answer since it was created in 2011. SEO. The only significant reason to be on Google+ is that this can help your company’s SEO efforts & that’s about it. We won’t get into all of the boring technical details as to why Google+ is great for SEO, we’ll let our SEO experts talk about that some other time.
Other than SEO, Google+ isn’t of much use. Consumers are spending approximately 63 times more time on Facebook than Google+. With far more users and far more time spent on Facebook, this is where your social media efforts needs to start. Sure, it’s nice to have a business page and keep your information timeline on Google+, but here’s yet another example to back what you may already know. 6 minutes, 47 seconds – it’s all in the numbers.