Google Plus Is Quietly Making Gains

When I was talking Jack into blogging, I said, “I touch 200,000 people twice a week.”

He said, “How do you know?”

I said, “I counted.”

A month later, he told me a post had gone to a quarter of a million people. I said, “That’s nice.” I wasn’t going to take the bait. He was planning to tell me that he had counted.

My metrics are making a count when something major changes. Not weekly, not monthly, and often not annually.

Last week I saw one of my posts was retweeted, and following the link I got to see the Sales Lab Posts mobile display for the first time.

I thanked the tweeter who replied, would I retweet their stuff?

Nothing wrong with that. What’s the metric? Before I jump in, I want to know how much is enough.

Response? “World domination”

Say what? Well, that’s not coming from my twitter following!

Then I checked and saw I had close to ten times the following on Google Plus. Honest Officer, I have no idea how that happened.

I also prefer monitoring the incoming stream in Google Plus because I can see more of the posts without clicking on them. Twitter has an art form of attention grabbing headlines that are more interesting than the underlying posts.

I know my Plus followers. They have built some space with what they know, what interests them. My Twitter followers are often incomprehensible, although I suspect more than a few are followers of Charles Ponzi.

I have a sense of pressure that I’m wasting time when I read on the Internet. Turns out I am covering much more ground per minute, and having the search box right on the browser means I don’t have any research tasks waiting when I am done.

I can read a newspaper in 15 minutes. I cover much more ground reading the Plus stream or Reader.

We’ve noticed that there is a definite crewe saying, “I never see Google Plus. They’re not doing so well.” We’ve also noticed there is a 100% correlation with them not having a plus page.

The most common response from Plus users is that they had no great expectations of Google Plus, but it was easy to set up and they use stream, hangout, photos or whatever feature more than they had expected they would.

Google Plus is quietly making gains. How are you moving up?