Google+ is the fastest growing social network – or is it?

At December 6, 2012, Google announced that Google+ is the fastest growing social network ever. It announced that it had more than 500 million users and that 235 million users where active – 135 million users where active just in the stream. But how do you measure a social networks success? Is it by the number of users? Is it by the number of active users? Is it by the time spend on the site?

If you look at how much time users has spent on different social networks, you haven’t yet seen the success of Google+. A statistic that was brought in the Guardian and made by comScore, showed that Google+ is actually falling in the number of minuts that users spent on the site:

This statistic actually showed that Pinterest is the most growing Social network right now (measured in time spent on the site) and that Tumblr is the second most growing network. However it seems like the biggest growth of Pinterest is now over.

But if you look on Google+ it is not growing as Google sad – it is falling. So what can Google+ do to increase the time spent on their site? I think that Google+ communities, that Google+ recently released is a major force in winning the social time of the users (By the way, if you search for some good communities to follow – look here). On Google+ communities people can discuss a lot of questions, get help to a lot of issues, discuss articles and news around the web, find followers that has the same interest and market your website. Some of the traffic to regular communities will move from websites to Google+ in the future and then leading to an increase in time spent.

Google has also launched Google Authorship – a link between your website and Google+, which may in the future influence websites place in search engine result pages (SERP). Many websites will therefore link their website to their Google+ profile, and try to interact more on Google+, because it is believed that interacting on Google+ may affect your Author rank – a rank that does not currently influence SERP, but will in the future. Therefore websites will also try to get their visitors to use Google+. So the launch of Google Authorship will lead to a higher time spent, but first when companies and websites all over the world realize that they have to use Google Authorship, and first when Author rank influence SERP (first a lot of test has to be made to ensure that the launch will higher the quality of SERP).

But will Google+ ever attract your personal relations from Facebook and get the private stuff onto Google+ instead of Facebook. Will people ever share their private thoughts on Google+, will they wish people happy birthday on Google+ like on Facebook and will they use Google+ to invite to private parties? As I see it right now, Google+ will not steel a lot of active, private users from Facebook. Not as long as people are happy about Facebook. People doesn’t want more than one personal, social network – they only need and have time to one.

But I think that Google+ will be used for a lot of professional communication and meeting a lot of new people, and not just your personal relations like on Facebook. You will use Google+ for a lot of issues, that you today do on different websites. If a website has a discussion board on their website and a community on Google+, we will see a lot of users moving from the website to the community. You will use Google+ a lot to increase your knowledge.

Do you think that Google+ will steal users from Facebook? Do you think that Google+ will grow in time spent? What do you think Google+ will be used for? Feel free to leave a comment below. And by the way, I would be happy if you would share this post with your personal network and follow me on Google+.