Google+ Page Views – Exaggerated?

 

Facebook vs. Google+

I opened my Google+ page a little less than two months ago. Almost a year ago, I closed my Facebook page which I started back in 2008. I felt an odd sense of freedom when doing this. I used that social networking site mainly to reconnect with people I knew or had not seen in ages. I always had the feeling when adding or being added as a friend that it was like a “hello” or “how have you been”.  It was a nice way to keep contact and a novel concept to me, yet I found myself checking on it too often and a certain vicarious addiction of uselessness persisted. Needless to say, the way each of us use any social network will entail a different outcome depending on the intended approach.

My signing up in the Google social network is with the intention of networking and to build potential author ranking with the most dominant of search engines. It brings a nice flow of traffic to the blogs I write and bookmark on a regular WordPress account. In the short time I have signed up, I have from scratch, garnered 22 people in my circle. I was surprised to see that I have over 13 thousand page views. Is this possible?

Google+ Page Views

The most recent addition to Google+ has been what is called Page Views and it is the total number of content views -page, post and picture views related to the account. I submit my posts to an SEO related community and try my best to add value and find time to read many other postings, peruse infographs and the wide variety of useful information. My posts are reshared and +1’d several times but nothing extraordinary, as of yet.

Facebook boasts over a billion active users on average for each month. Except, you can find your grandparents on there, cat ladies, and I have recently seen a homeless man checking on his Facebook page. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I will say that Google+ seems ahead in terms of quality content on their social site versus Facebook. David Amerland, well known author of “Google Semantics” and “The Social Media Mind”, has mentioned that people behave “better” on Google+ compared to all other social sites. This may be attributed to the same reason I chose and prefer it. People are making the connection with the relationship Google proffers with their own products as opposed to that of their competitors and want to reap the long term rewards and benefits.

What of this new page view analytic? It is the running tally since October of 2012. I have looked around and on some days I feel yes, it is possible that so many people have viewed my content and yet on others I fear it is a vain approach to keeping me on the site and a metric possibly inflated to increase and maintain users and connections. Google+ is 3 years old and has a total of 540 Million users of which only half are active. Will Google+ surpass Facebook one day and thus your great aunt will be forced to share family portraits on the current and more popular realm? Will the saturation and diversity cause a decrease in quality and behavior?

Does anyone get the feeling the page view numbers are skewed or are they justifiable?