Google+ was introduced in late June of 2011 and has quickly grown into a platform with 135 million active users. In celebration of Google+ success SVP of Engineering Vic Gundotra shared new stats Thursday at the SMX Social Media Marketing conference in Las Vegas.
While over 500 million users and the release of Communities was part of Vic’s announcement, he also talked about other aspects of the network for over an hour with Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land.
Google+ Communities offer an easy way for users and businesses to create specific groups. As an example, Vic shared that companies such as Audi or Toyota could create groups for specific cars. This hyper-attention to specific brand products helps to further segment a company’s audience and better communicate with them.
For marketers, Google+ is showing much promise. For example, Cadbury has seen an increase in click-through rates by 17 percent and fashion retailer H&M has seen an increase in click-through rates of 22 percent. Danny asked about Google+ Local regarding the migration from Google Places and Vic agreed they can do a much better job of explaining and simplifying the process.
Moving forward the social network will be focusing on user satisfaction in 2013 while further improving privacy. Native iOS integration was talked about, unfortunately there was no word on when or if it will happen.
Vic also said the Google+ team is hard at work on further expanding vanity URLs for users and creating better analytics for business users.
You can check out a live blog of the conversation here or watch the talk below:
Google+ shows no signs of slowing down and it appears employees involved are taking the advice “Always be shipping” to heart.
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