No surprise, businesses will go where the customers are and Google+ is a ghost town. Only active accounts are webmasters trying to find some gain out of it to rank better :)

If they wanted a piece of the social market they should've gone the usual way about it - either strike a search/ad deal with FB or simply buy them out.

I and every single webmaster that I know only use Google plus in the high hopes it helps out with our SEO.

And I only do the bare minimum.

I believe Google thought they could leverage their search dominance over us webmasters to force US to promote it for them. A lot of webmasters have complied, and still it lags behind. It's just not going to work.

I don't use it at all for my sites. I considered it, but I just can't see an ROI on my time and energy. I have buttons on one site so visitors can share my pages with Google+ or a variety of other networks. The Google+ shares are nothing compared to the others. It just looks sad.

I and every single webmaster that I know only use Google plus in the high hopes it helps out with our SEO.

The sad thing is that I think that it does help with SEO.

From a user perspective, Facebook is original and cool. Google + is a cheesy knock off and an uncool, convoluted mess. I agree with altrus, their only hope would be to buy them out...and Z, should ask for 100 billion - that's only $100/user.

Every month, I run a survey of Irish and Irish hosted websites (approx 326K websites). The survey is comprehensive as it is part of a search engine development process and it classifies webusage. I checked the May 2013 survey and counted the links out from Irish sites. The results are interesting.

All Irish sites === Core Irish Web
Facebook: 11.28% === 21.21%
Twitter: 8.08% === 15.19%
Youtube: 3.14% === 5.91%
LinkedIn: 2.18% === 4.10%
Google+: 0.71% === 1.33%

The Core Irish Web is basically the set of active websites with holding pages, PPC parked sites, for sale sites, external redirects and compromised sites removed.

In technical terms, G+ is banjaxed when it comes to the Irish web. And if these results are replicated globally, then G+ might be another one of those Google ideas that looked good on a whiteboard.

Regards...jmcc

took G+ buttons off my sites finally couple of weeks back.

long story short: you can't force people to like and use something. G just haven't learnt that lesson with buzz, wave, whatever other faddy sites they tried to force down our throats. And G+ if anything has been the clearest example yet of this.

it's like trying to be the cool kid at school by going to the same clothes store he uses and buying EVERYTHING and then wearing it all at once. An ugly mess. And now they're just making fun of you even more than they were before.

If I get to G+ twice in a month, I'm doing good .. Don't have G+ buttons on any sites and the subject of G+ never comes up during social media brainstorming sessions with clients.

The client consensus lately has been driving traffic to their own sites, as opposed to driving it to Facebook or Twitter even .. Tho' I offer social networking included in the packages, more and more are not wanting to include it in their end solutions.

So ... if Facebook and Twitter aren't being considered like they once were, you could just imagine where that leaves G+ ..

I like how G+ wants a link on the homepage to verify ownership of a site. Is this not a link scheme? lol Yes, the alternative is to use a meta tag, but on some CMS you have to code a conditional for the homepage.

I think all these social networks hope businesses will dump their own website and produce content on their platforms so they can further monetize our work.

Back to topic, I don't think people are avoiding G+ or some flaw is causing it to not win over the big brands. Managing and producing quality content takes a great deal of work. Updating Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc. all takes time and money. Businesses want to see some sort of return for maintaining these profiles, and many can't justify the expense. If it were not for the SEOs pushing social, I think many businesses would greatly reduce spending on updates and instead spend that money on advertising.

Social media is thinly disguised spam.

I can't stand the begging for likes and useless Twitter updates. Big brands begging for likes make me cringe. Or even just putting their fb page in TV commercials. What the h is wrong with just the brand's own URL? How did the world manage to spin when there was no fb, lol?

Social media is like a high-maintenance woman/man. You can tolerate it for a while but then it gets annoying.

FB/Twitter/+ when you stop an think about them, add very little value to users. And if Google bases its Search algo on value-adds for users, they could shut down their + experiment. It's not a +; it's a -.

A for effort
Z for value

Let's find something else to replace "social." How about "value"?

I'd like to see some kind of new rating system. What's the value of Likes without Dislikes?

P.S. When are we going to see YouTube ratings in search results? They give us YELP ratings but not YT ratings (and they own YT). Lol.

Haven't read the article but comparing G+ to Facebook is comparing apples to oranges. I agree with a lot of the sentiments in this thread, but they are obviously very different things.

There must be some way Google can turn this around by facilitating in the massive theft of somebody’s content. If they can’t figure that out it’s pretty much a “dead in the water” type thing.

Interesting, I posted about G+ in the Google search forum:

[webmasterworld.com...]

The sad thing is that I think that it does help with SEO.

@chrisv1963 - How certain are you? I ask because of the question in my post:

I noticed today that a scraper that I have been unable to get removed is steadily taking over many of my SERPs and Image results and they have 981 Google+

Are we sure that Google+ has not now incorporated + into the algo, I'm not sure if it was ever decided it were or not, however in light of the above what is the current thinking on this?

Has anyone experienced a provable benefit from Google+?

I just have this funny feeling in my water!

As said some years ago, the future is privacy, no spying on users. So when a user is already on facebook where the user knows, its a bad place, why should he/she start on another portal, that only reason is also only getting as much info on a user as possible. As said users , are not the dumb users as it was some 5 years ago, they are getting more concerned about what there data is used for. See example new internet explore adverting "PRIVACY".
Google is also not that popular as some years ago, specially among webmaster, but also the normal user, every time there is something about google its negative.

Forget brands............google + is failing to win people over. Social media as google are finding out is a fickle croud, just ask bebo and myspace. Social media was the party no one invited the rich kid too (Google). So the rich kid started his own party, trouble is no one came....

I guess when Google was assembling that press release about its "Knowledge" graph, Star Trek and the ship's computer, the PR flunky never watched the "Who Mourns For Adonais" episode. :)

Regards...jmcc

@Chrisv1963

The sad thing is that I think that it does help with SEO.

Come to think of it....I built a fake (but extremely real looking) Google plus profile page and attached it to one of my sites. Fake personna, fake personal information, added Google Authorship tags to the website.

It's the only site in my portfolio that's ranking #1.

they already use all kinds of dirty tricks to win users over like forcing g+ profiles upon youtube and adsense users. so it's not difficult to imagine that they want to entice webmasters to use g+ in exchange to better serp rankings.

every day google gets more unappealing.