Gigya: Only 2 Percent Of Social Sharing Happens On Google+

Despite a reportedly growing user base, Google+ isn’t popular when it comes to sharing content on social networks.

A new report from Gigya says that only two percent of social sharing happened on Google+ in Q2 of this year (April-June 2013). That’s a fraction of the sharing that took place on Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest, Gigya says.

Those same three sites — Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest — are the top sharing destinations from both media/publishing sites and ecommerce sites, too. But in the latter category, ecommerce, Pinterest is actually the top sharing destination.

In both of those categories, Google+ is again getting only about two percent of the social sharing activity. When presented with data like this in the past, Google has typically explained the numbers by saying that most sharing on Google+ happens privately, making such sharing invisible to data crawling. But rather than data crawling, Gigya would be measuring clicks via its social tools that are embedded on client sites — so the charts above show that very few visitors to those sites are clicking to share content on Google+.

A recent SearchMetrics study suggested that Google+ sharing will overtake Facebook by 2016, but the survey actually compared two different things: +1 clicks on Google+ against “shares” on Facebook. A more apples-to-apples comparison would be Facebook “likes” to +1 clicks, or Facebook “shares” and Google+ shares/posts.

Gigya offers social media tools such as social logins and registration, plugins and gamification. The company says its client roster has more than 700 leading brands — including ABC-TV, Pepsi, Toyota, Nike, American Idol and Verizon — and its tools are used on hundreds of thousands of websites, reaching 1.5 billion consumers each month.

We’ve also published a separate article about Gigya’s current social login statistics.