Like many Google+ adopters, lately I’ve been wondering at what point Google+ will “tip” and become my primary social network.
Today I saw this post by Frank Rogan in my G+ stream:
…which made me wonder, exactly how much of a ghost town is Google+?
On Facebook, I have 643 friends and on Google+ I have 255 people in circles. So by “friend” numbers alone, Google+ is doing very well (at least for me personally), given that several years separate the two services, yet I have 40% the number of friends on G+ as I do on Facebook.
But the real metric of course is activity of those friends. Controlling for autoposts (i.e. only counting Facebook posts initiated by users, not applications, pages I like or Facebook updating me on profile changes), I counted all the status updates on both networks for the past 16 hours - basically from midnight until now (4:30pm my time, as I write this, on a Sunday). I also made sure I viewed all the “Most Recent” FB posts and had turned on the option to show everyone, to try to make it as accurate as possible.
Not exactly scientific, but here are the results:
- Facebook: 643 friends, 164 posts
- Google+: 255 friends, 10 posts
So that’s a post rate of .26 for Facebook, versus .04 for Google+.
So in my networks at least, Facebook users are posting 6.5x more often than Google+ users.
So it will likely be a while before I make Google+ my primary social network…
