Dive summary:
- Gigya recently released a report stating that only 2% of overall social sharing is occurring on Google+; Facebook continues to dominate with 50% of the shares.
- When presented with unflattering data like this in the past, Google has explained it by saying most shares are private and therefore invisible to data crawling, but Gigya's study was performed with their social tools embedded on clients' sites and measured clicks to share on those sites.
- Other studies that have shown a more promising outlook for Google+ have been comparing different types of sharing—Facebook "shares" versus Google "+1's"—instead of more comparable actions like Facebook "likes" and Google "+1's."
From the article:
"A recent SearchMetrics study suggested that Google+ sharing will overtake Facebook by 2016, but the survey actually compared two different things: +1 clicks on Google+ against “shares” on Facebook. A more apples-to-apples comparison would be Facebook “likes” to +1 clicks, or Facebook “shares” and Google+ shares/posts."