In SEO news, it appears as though the talk of the Google+ platform being a ghost town have resurfaced and this time there seems to be more reason behind the claims than pure speculation. Some SEOs and SMMs have reasoned away the latest claims as the failure to correctly gauge engagement, but after a 90 day examination of on-platform interaction habits, the point may be quite valid. The findings have actually been surprising, even to those who thought G+ was not all it was cracked up to be already.
The number of users has been under intense debate. Apparently the platform is only actively used by around 20% of the people that have registered for it, meaning a little over 23 million active users. Of those, only about half use it more than three times per week, and even then, they tend to share less than 5 pieces of content. This is a far cry from the numbers seen on Facebook for the same type of grouping.
Furthermore, there are many users not yet realizing that each +1 is similar to a Like on Facebook, but that Google is using those to gauge popularity of content as a small part of their ranking algorithm which is skewing SERP results to some degree. Finally, it was seen that most users still only interact directly with a fractional percentage of their followers as circles are designed in nature to make it appear as though users have a widespread group of friends/followers.
