Google+ Statistics Show Over 1 Billion User and Building to Overtake Facebook

There's a general perception out there that Google's social network is a virtual ghost town, versus Facebook's online playground, which is always bustling with activity. Google's tried to dispel that notion on occasion by revealing user stats, and if you look closely at the latest numbers, you might be surprised at just how busy Google+ is these days.

Tina Courtney-Brown at SiteProNews did some digging and discovered that Google+ is now home to over 1 billion registered users, which compares favorably to Facebook's 1.19 billion. It's true that Google+'s stats are somewhat artificially inflated due to Google integrating accounts for its various services. However, Courtney-Brown says over 540 million Google+ users visit their profiles every month to share photos, update their statuses, post comments, and more. And that +1 button? It's being clicked over 5 billion times a day across the web.

Google Plus Phone
Image Source: Flickr (clasesdeperiodismo)

That's a lot of active users, many of which are younger people. If you're a business looking to target the all-important teen and young adult demographics, you may want to reevaluate your presence on Google+.

What about mobile? According to Courtney-Brown, some 26 percent of mobile users that access the web for social reasons use Google+. We can pull more from that stat -- over 20 million unique mobile users access Google+ each and every month, and that figure is growing.

Like Facebook, Google+ is what you make of it. If you don't actively seek out people and businesses of interest to add to your circles, it will remain a ghost town even though hundreds of millions of users are accessing the site every month.