Only One Month In, Google Plus Shows Promise For Online Marketers

It may have only launched a mere month ago, but Google Plus is already showing signs of promise to online marketers, especially in its ability to drive traffic to other Websites.

Google's brand new social product has a long way to go before it poses a realistic threat to Facebook's massive marketshare, but havingsurpassed the 20 million user mark in under a month, its growth has been impressive. By comparison, it took Facebook and Twitter a few years to reach the same milestone.

While businesses are still patiently awaiting the arrival of its official brand pages, some can count on Google Plus to drive significant traffic to their Websites.

In one case study, Google Plus was shown to comprise over 15% of referrals to Web marketing blog Wordstream, beating LinkedIn's 9.8% and trailing not too far behind Twitter. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've also seen Google Plus makes its way into our top sources of referral traffic in just a matter of weeks.

In a more extreme case, technology blog LAUNCH saw 67% of its traffic come from Google Plus in a single day, according to a post by its founder Jason Calacanis on none other than - you guessed it - Google Plus.

These early numbers come with an obvious caveat: the sites mentioned above are all publishers, whose content is more common for people to organically share via social media than, say, the "Products" page of a small business's Website. Just as with other social media channels, businesses are going to need a content and social marketing strategy that makes sense and serves them and their customers well in order to be successful when Google Plus brand pages finally do drop.

Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2011/07/google-plus-drives-traffic-online-marketing.php