Sometimes I share my post to various social media sites. This morning, as it happened, I shared a post almost simultaneously to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. On my hit counter, I now see
- 80 hits via Facebook
- 30 hits via Google Plus
- 23 hits via Twitter
Wouldn’t you have expected G+ to come in a lot lower? Despite the general sense that it’s a total failure, there really are a fair number of people using it.
Just to reassure you the Earth is still on its axis, Google Search provided 58 hits and Bing 2.
Quomodocumque 
You’re right. I would have expected a lower count for G+. I’m relieved though. I am hoping this is a sign people are actually getting tired of Facebook and it’s constant attempts to “know you better” and make up for the dough Zuckerberg lost by going public.
It seems that more and more we judge such things to be total failures if they are not totally dominant in the market place. That’s sad. That said, I think that Google has failed to make Google+ an aesthetically compelling product. it looks like something designed by engineers. For example, I find myself too often clicking on “expand this post” or “expand this comment” only to be confronted by only a few additional lines. Before their recent update, the pages often loaded slowly, in part, I’m guessing, because the graphics in the top matter were higher resolution than needed on a typical screen. The recent update seems to have solved that, but now the top matter takes up nearly half the vertical space on my older MacBook Pro. They attempt to alleviate this a bit when you scroll down, but that damned stationary top matter still intrudes way too far down into the vertical space. The engineers probably designed this page layout using “retina displays” and never bothered to check the design on anything else.
As I understand it, Google+ is disproportionately popular with geeky and artsy types compared to with the general public, which would to some extent explain why it does fairly well on your posts.
You call them “geeky and artsy types,” I call them “thought leaders!”
Richard, I have to say I feel just the opposite — I like the Google+ look better than Facebook, and it seems like Facebook is trying to go more in the G+ direction with bigger picture presence on the newsfeed.
JSE, I wasn’t making a direct comparison to Facebook which I’m not even particularly familiar with. (Does that date me?) I was critical of some ergonomic aspects of the current Google+ design. I’ve written software with “user interfaces” so I’m particularly critical of such things. I do keep returning to Google+ because I do find interesting stuff there. And I’m not sure about pictures on the newsfeed, but Google+ does handle photos nicely and I’m a regular visitor to Laba’s Google+ page.
I think this has something to do with the way Google+ represents relationships between people and also the type of sharing it encourages.
On Facebook, you have friendship which is a symmetric relation. I would guess that a good number of people see your posts on Google+ who don’t see them on Facebook simply because you’ve never met them (or you met them only briefly) and they’d find it awkward to send a friend request for you to confirm. On Google+, that’s a non-issue. They just add you to a Circle. It doesn’t matter whether you want to see those people’s posts, and you don’t confirm anything.
I suspect that if I were to post something to Google+ and Facebook simultaneously, I’d see a lower ratio of Google+ traffic to Facebook traffic than you, simply because I’m much less well-known and the people who are interested in my thoughts are more likely to be my friends. (Of course, Facebook responded to Google+ Circles with the concept of subscribers, but this hasn’t really taken off.)
I was surprised that Google+ drove more traffic than Twitter, but it might be in part because Twitter encourages very frequent sharing, so it’s easy for things to get lost in the stream. But maybe this is made up for by the resharing. Aside from that, you only joined Twitter two months ago.
So, yeah, there are people who use Google+, but I don’t think referral traffic is necessarily reflective of user base, even if we restrict consideration to the people who want to hear your ideas.