Kicking one Google+ myth in the head

English: Google+ wordmark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm not one of the digital marketing community who likes to bash Google+. I actually like Google+. Always have and I feel my loyalty to the platform, and time spent on it, is being rewarded as it is evolving in the right direction.

On Google+ I find myself among strong gamer communtities and popping in and out of craft and photograph communities too. It might be funny to joke that Google+ is just populated by SEOs and Social Media heads but it is wrong.

One of the claims that bug me when people report on Google+ is the one that suggests people aren't posting - that it's a ghost town.

This strikes me as a failure to understand what Google+ is offering.

Google+ is offering you a way to share content with your friends in such a way that a stranger can't come along, check out your profile and work out whether you're using Google+ or not.

Or am I just being defensive?

One way to find out is to pop into my Google+ stream and count the number of posts in the space of 180 seconds. I want to see what percentage of them are public compared to limited. How much of Google+ is protected by the privacy that Circles offer.

This test excludes comments on posts. The 3 minutes run for this test happned to occur between 16:10 and 16:13.



Fine, okay... This micro survey doesn't manage to kick anyone in the head but it surely suggests that a percentage of Google+ content isn't available for public scrutiny. In my 3 minute test 50% of posts lived behind Circle shares only.

I also think eight posts in only 3 minutes isn't too bad either!