Google+ isn’t held in higher esteem by most marketers. In fact, you could be forgiven for believing that the social networking platform had vanished off the radar recently.
Google + seems to have been limping to a slow death since its underwhelming launch in 2011 even though Twitter Facebook and Instagram all regularly feature in media discourse.
There are more than two billion Google+ profiles as each person that has a Google account (in email for instance) is given one. The amount of those profiles that can be counted as users that are active is far, far lower than this, together with the amount being estimated by Forbes at 111 million.
This is way below their most important rivals.
It’s surprising then, the social networking platform has come out on top of the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) 2017.
The ACSI surveys 4,978 customers over email and asks them how they feel about particular businesses and brands. When it came into media firms that are social, Google+ has come jumped out of obscurity with a surprise win.
Small but dedicated user base
The report notes that Google+ has seen a gain of 7 percent since it underwent a redesign in January and introduced new attributes.
The brands, in order are:
– Google+
– Wikipedia
– YouTube
– Tumblr
What explains this outcome? It would appear to reveal the potential advantages that brands can be brought for by a specialised audience. The report puts Pinterest placing down to its move towards making better use of search technologies, in addition to making it more easy to buy products directly from the site.
The Forbes survey discovered that Google+ might have found its niche in community pages, which seem to be the principal reason people are using this platform.
So rather than being dead, it seems that its core audience has been discovered by Google +. It will be intriguing to see whether it can build from there, or if it’s going to be content to make its support for its users.
