Google+, Six Months In

While only 17 per cent of the network's users can be considered active contributors, the brand-oriented Pages feature has been generating more traffic.

Hey, remember Google+? It's been six months since Google's latest entry into the social networking world was first made available in its beta form, and now Flowtown, a social media marketing company, has published an analysis (in handy infographic form!) breaking down just who is using the site and for what purposes. So far, Google+'s users are overwhelmingly male (63 per cent) and English-speaking, with Canadians, as always, adopting it in greater numbers (relative to the country's population) than the U.S., U.K., Germany, Brazil, and more. All told, there are some 40 million people with Google+ accounts, but only 17 per cent of those can be considered active users. (That 40 million is about five per cent of Facebook's 800 million or so users.) While the number of users continues to grow, traffic has steadily declined since the network was made publicly available to everybody in September. However, the introduction in November of Google+ Pages, which are accounts for companies and organizations, has helped bump up traffic, and could provide a growing stream of users, as only 61 of the U.S.' top 100 brands currently have Google+ Pages.