I remember 14th July 2011, during the release of company’s Q2 2011 earning call google team announced that Google+ has hit a 10 million mark, in next three months i.e 13th Oct 2011 the number was up to 40 million! An increase of 10 million users per month. Isn’t that impressive!!
Now lets look at Facebook, sometime in September, during its F8 developer conference, the Social Networking giant Facebook revealed that the user base if over 800 million active users! An increase of 50 million new users since july 6th 2011, during a video call announcement.
Comparisions are good, but not everytime! After Google released its Q3 2011 earnings yesterday, I saw some people making odd comparisons between Facebook and Google+. A few journalists and analysts started pointing out that Facebook is now 20 times the size of Google+, or put another way, that Google+ already has 5 percent of Facebook’s user base. This is simply not true.
What you need to notice is Google+ refers to the number of people that joined google’s new initative and facebook refers to the number of active user (They must have signed in atleast once in 30 odd days). Hence it’s fairly obvious that FB no of signups is far higher than 800 million mark (A close source in Facebook says that they have beaten India’s polulation mark of 1,173,108,018)!!
Not to discount the fact that google’s latest offering is only one month old and Facebook has been around for a much longer time duration, so facebook’s growth would be stagnated. Still, the important thing to remember is that until Google starts talking about active users, we won’t be able to compare the two services directly in terms of user growth nor user count.
Not to forget that the so called facebook killer has helped Facebook transformed.
The war between Facebook and Google is going to get even fiercer this month. In fact, I expect we’ll see a lot more in the next quarters to come than we are seeing in the current one. If you don’t believe me now, you will soon: Google+ is indeed the best thing that has ever happened to Facebook.
Emily Wilson is the associate editor of marketing and media for Appitive, where she covers digital marketing news, the fashion industry and the evolving media landscape. Emily joined the Appitive family in July 2011. She calls herself as a Passionate Social Media Diva, is an Int'l Social Media Speaker & Trainer. Emily is a graduate of Ambrose University College, where she received her B.A. in English with Honors.
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