Face­book vs. Google Plus En­gage­ment - You Had No Idea How Bad It Is For … ! [in­fo­graphic]

There’s a time a man must face the TRUTH! I liked Google plus bet­ter than Face­book. I called my­self a Google Plus Am­bas­sador. Then I looked at the numbers!

Most busi­ness own­ers and mar­keters still haven’t joined Google plus.

  • If you haven’t joined g+, you’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing whether it’s worth the ad­di­tional time.
  • If you have joined g+, you’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing whether it’s worth the ad­di­tional time. Oh.

Here’s the story: Every time some­one calls Google plus a ‘ghost town’ I get de­fen­sive and ex­plain how great Google plus is. I tell them how every­body is get­ting Google wrong. Just like many fel­low Google plus users with me.

  • We’ve dissed Jour­nal­ists who were writ­ing about low Google plus engagement.
  • We’ve sus­pected them of get­ting paid by Facebook.
  • We bom­barded the wall of g+ crit­ics with ma­li­cious comments.

Hey, at least there’s some engagement! 

If you want to get slapped, go and send a mes­sage out say­ing ‘Google plus is a ghost town,’ or ‘En­gage­ment on Google plus is un­be­liev­ably low.’

Then, a few weeks back, I started to look­out for Google plus con­tent that Plussers posted to their Face­book wall as well. And I looked at how many likes, com­ments, and shares they get on both platforms.

Then I looked at how many fol­low­ers they have. And I crunched the num­bers, with sur­pris­ing results.

Here are 3 ex­am­ples for promi­nent so­cial net­work­ers and how their fans en­gage on Face­book and Google plus.

  1. With Mari Smith’s num­bers you may still think ‘so what?’ 
  2. When you see Robert Scoble’s num­bers you’ll be surprised.
  3. When you see Guy Kawasaki’s num­bers, you’ll be in tears (if you’re a Google plus evan­ge­list) or rolling on the floor laugh­ing (if you’re a Face­book fan, or Mark Zuckerberg).

The num­bers be­low are for a spe­cific post that was posted to Google plus and to Face­book on the same day. The num­bers were taken a few days af­ter the post, when ac­tiv­ity had died.

Infographic: Mari Smith, user engagement on Google plus and Facebook compared.

(Sorry for the ex­ces­sive ibmm brand­ing, I pulled 9 sep­a­rate graph­ics to­gether on this page.)

Mar­i’s num­bers are in­ter­est­ing, be­cause she has roughly the same num­ber of sub­scribers on both so­cial me­dia sites. It must be said, though, that the post on Face­book was posted to her Fan Page, not to her per­sonal pro­file. Mari Smith has many more sub­scribers on her profile.

But I needed to com­pare num­bers for the same con­tent on g+ and Face­book, and this piece was posted to the fan page.

Source:
This is the post for which I com­pared the numbers:
https://plus.google.com/112707199408484711520/posts/QfyCJHe9BRT

Here’s Mari Smith’s Face­book Fan Page:
https://www.facebook.com/marismith

Infographic: Robert Scoble, user engagement on Google plus and Facebook compared.

Robert’s re­sults for this post vary more than Mar­i’s. For likes this post’s re­sults are much worse, for shares the re­sults are bet­ter. This is pretty rare, though.

While Mari Smith has sim­i­lar au­di­ence size (re­mem­ber, it’s only her Face­book Page), in Robert’s sam­ple the g+ au­di­ence is much larger.

Many peo­ple say that larger fol­low­ing will re­sult in less engagement.

Source:
Robert Scoble’s Google plus post:
https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/EYSBfatd1SL

And Robert’s Face­book profile:
https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble

Infographic: Guy Kawasaki, user engagement on Google plus and Facebook compared.

Did I check the wrong post? Is it an outlier?

These num­bers are so ex­treme that I wanted to make sure I did­n’t catch an out­lier. I checked with Cir­cle­Count. The re­sults above are in line with Guy’s av­er­age re­sults over the last 30 days. Av­er­age is 28 com­ments per post­ing, 19 re­shares per post­ing, and 66 +1’s per post­ing; with cur­rently 1,912,115 followers.

Guy Kawasak­i’s num­bers are way off, in two ways.

  1. Com­pared to Face­book, the en­gage­ment num­bers are un­be­liev­ably low on Google plus.
  2. Look­ing at the posts of Mari and Guy on Face­book, his en­gage­ment num­bers are also way down, com­pared to Mari.

Why is that so?

I be­lieve the rea­son is that Mari mostly posts within a small range of top­ics. Mari is all about so­cial me­dia and Facebook.

Guy, on the other hand, is fa­mous for do­ing the op­po­site. He loves find­ing in­ter­est­ing stuff across ALL TOP­ics.

Robert Scoble is some­where in­be­tween. He’s all about tech star­tups, gad­gets, and a pint of Rack­space. His posts are broader than Mar­i’s, but not as broad as Guy’s.

Look at the top­ics from Guy’s last 10 g+ posts today:

  1. Marsh­mal­low Twig Roaster
  2. Grad­u­a­tion Speeches
  3. Ya­hoo CEO Re­sume Revelations
  4. Origami
  5. His Google plus book, What the Plus!
  6. A Moth­er’s Day gift for a hockey mom
  7. Ap­ple Inc.
  8. May Day cel­e­bra­tions and protests 
  9. A funny pic about Sil­i­con Val­ley Nerds
  10. A cop pulling over a dough­nut truck

Peo­ple love Guy Kawasaki for the new, funny, and in­ter­est­ing things he finds every day.

Yet, it seems to de­crease en­gage­ment massively.

Source:

Guy’s Google plus post:
https://plus.google.com/112374836634096795698/posts/WbpeyEwvBSk

And Guy Kawasak­i’s Face­book profile:
https://www.facebook.com/guy 

The hid­den met­rics and the ROI of so­cial me­dia marketing.

Likes, com­ments, and shares are easy to count. They don’t help us pay the rent, though. Or the Fer­rari. *wink @ Mari* At least not in a way we can mea­sure easily.

From a sales and mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive the most im­por­tant met­ric is ‘click-throughs.’ Clicks to our pro­mo­tions, clicks to our sites. More click-throughs = more con­ver­sions and higher ad revenue.

I don’t know the click-throughs for Mari, Robert, and Guy. It might well be that en­gage­ment on g+ is low, but the click throughs from up to 2 mil­lion fol­low­ers are high enough!

Con­clu­sions about en­gage­ment on Google plus com­pared to Facebook. 

Keep in mind that I’m us­ing 3 ran­domly picked posts to il­lus­trate my ideas. This is not ‘proof’ for any­thing, fur­ther study is necessary.

1. En­gage­ment is sig­nif­i­cantly lower on Google plus. This is a big­gie, al­though Google plus users fre­quently deny it. Your day has only 24 hours. There are un­lim­ited mar­ket­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties out there. You have to eval­u­ate if Google plus is re­ally worth your time.

Chris Bro­gan has spo­ken open words in his ses­sion at So­cial Me­dia Suc­cess Sum­mit 2012 two days ago. Slightly para­phras­ing: „I don’t think it’s crit­i­cal to have a Google plus busi­ness page. You’re not go­ing to have a lot in­ter­ac­tion.” He rec­om­mended that if you en­gage on Google plus you rather use your per­sonal pro­file than a busi­ness page.

The en­gage­ment an­a­lyzed in this blog post is from per­sonal pro­files. If you did the same analy­sis for pages, you’d quickly close the book on Google plus and move on to Face­book and LinkedIn.

2. Build­ing a larger au­di­ence of­ten re­sults in lower en­gage­ment. On any plat­form. The larger your au­di­ence is, the less tar­geted it is. The more tar­geted your au­di­ence is, the more suc­cess­ful any cam­paign will be. You don’t need to tar­get all the 2 Bil­lion peo­ple who have in­ter­net. You’ll have less work and bet­ter re­sults the smaller and more tar­geted your au­di­ence is.

3. If you re­strict your posts to a tightly de­fined topic, you’ll get higher en­gage­ment. This, too, is about tar­geted so­cial me­dia mar­ket­ing. Post­ing across many dif­fer­ent top­ics will give you lower en­gage­ment. Cats and ba­con are the ex­cep­tion to the rule.

I’m nei­ther crit­i­ciz­ing any of these au­thors, nor say­ing bye bye to Google plus. I DO like g+ bet­ter. I AM a g+ Am­bas­sador. But Google plus users must stop treat­ing every critic like an id­iot or a pro­pa­gan­dist paid by Facebook.

En­gage­ment is sig­nif­i­cantly lower on Google plus, even for celebri­ties. And for the lit­tle guy, like me, and prob­a­bly you, at g+ there’s a lot of time and work needed to get even a tiny bit of response.

I do be­lieve, though, that Google plus will be a suc­cess, and I’ll cover the ‘Why’ in a sep­a­rate post. 

Let me fin­ish with a quote from Guy Kawasaki that I picked up today:

„Get on Google plus! Stake your claim! Be­fore it be­comes ‘down­town Man­hat­tan.’ Look at it as in­vest­ment in the future.”

En­gage?