Report: Only two percent of social sharing takes place on Google+

Google+ may be one of the most popular social networks around in terms of user base, but there really isn’t much content sharing going on. The latest report from Gigya reveals that only two percent of social sharing takes place on Google+ which as you can imagine, pales in comparison to the level of sharing that takes place on Facebook and other popular social destinations.

According to the report, Facebook alone is responsible for a whopping 50 percent of all social sharing. Twitter placed second with 24 percent while Pinterest finished in third with 16 percent. Even LinkedIn beat out Google+ with three percent.

Broken down further, we also see that these three sites are the top sharing destinations among e-commerce and media / publishing outlets. Interestingly enough, however, Pinterest reigns supreme among e-commerce sites followed closely by Facebook.

Marketing Land points out that Google has been confronted with similar data in the past. Their explanation is that most sharing on Google+ happens privately which makes it invisible to data crawlers. That may be true for data collected from other firms but Gigya measures clicks via social tools installed on client sites.

A separate study from SearchMetric concluded that Google+ sharing would overtake Facebook sharing by 2016. That study actually compared two separate metrics: +1 clicks on Google+ against shares on Facebook. Perhaps the better comparison would have been Facebook likes to +1 clicks or Facebook shares to Google+ shares/posts.

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