National commercial radio on Google+

Meanwhile Heart don’t seem to have a G+ presence. Capital are on there, with 652 followers but again their account unused since July 2012.

Magic aren’t online, either nationally or locally although two London presenters Paul Phear and Angie Greaves have profiles, the latter confusing has three different ones all of which have been used at different times.

LBC is in 155 circles, but have also been ‘dark’ since March 2012.

Very interesting. Media UK does have a social media chart which shows these figures and more; but you’re right to point out how poor commercial radio is generally on Google+. Smooth Radio does have a good profile, though, and regularly fills up my Google+ information.

However, our own experiments seem to show that, frankly, nobody really uses Google+, and stations are probably right not to bother.

You’ve just reminded me to use the new smaller Google+ ‘follow’ buttons in the directory; and at the bottom of this page, too.

There is definitely an audience on G+, as a technology enthusiast I find it’s great for that. In fact, that’s what appeals to me about it, the fact that it’s a little in-crowd of tech journalists, bloggers and people I know in the industry. But I don’t think the audience for commercial radio is using it, they live on Facebook and Twitter, that’s where stations should concentrate their efforts.

I do smile at the disingenuous way James states “nobody really uses it” when he himself is an active user and knows that I am too, but I understand the point about how based on his own site metrics there is little engagement there. Speaking personally I use it more than any other social network as a way of both curating the thoughts and items I find interesting online and sharing photographs and videos privately with my immediate family, the idea of doing both on the same platform one that appeals to me enormously. Having tired of the negativity and superficiality of Twitter and with the privacy concerns of Facebook ever-present in the mind, G+ is where I live online and where any brand which wishes to engage with me digitally will have to be in the future – as indeed the Wimbledon championships have been doing over the past week or so.

That said, it is as Dan stated a matter of working out where to concentrate resources the best, particularly for where UK audiences happen to be and if FB and Twitter are the places to go then so be it. Worth noting though that before 2009 the same arguments could apply to Twitter. In late 2008 the platform was well over two years old but was primarily the domain of techie enthusiasts and early adopter geeks. It was only at the start of the following year that it gained critical mass and snowballed to the extent where Twitter integration is vital for everything, despite the damaging effect it has had upon our culture and society.

I would however make the following two points:

1) talkSPORT (which I work for) has 101,590 G+ followers at this precise moment. Not too far off the 169,247 Facebook likes it can boast but dwarfed by the 378,625 Twitter followers. As the station increasingly sees itself as a global brand and not just a national one, it does make sense that it has a social media presence across the board, and not just confined to where the UK audiences happen to be.

2) Having a social media presence that you have simply stopped bothering with is disastrous and looks terrible. As I mentioned, I expect brands that want to reach me to do so on G+. By having a page that has been dormant for over a year, both Absolute and LBC give the impression that they cared once to reach me but not so much any more. If they are not going to use the platform then they should either delete the profile altogether or at least clean out the old material so that they are simply benefiting from the SEO upweighting which Google has stated comes with having a public G+ profile.

After all no self respecting radio station in this day and age would dare have a website with DJ blogs and breakfast show minisites which have been dark for 6 months (although lots of them used to). Why excuse the same on social media?

talkSPORT’s G+ numbers are great and it’s interesting to see that they’re not far off FB.

What would be really interesting to see is whether G+ provided 2/3rds of the click thrus to talksport.co.uk that FB does. Or whether it’s more or less. That could provide some evidence about efficiency.

Does anybody on here think that Facebook is slowly passing by as a fad? I heard an interesting report on the wireless today that Facebook membership is slowly declining in the US, Canada and the UK, which is being described as Facebook Fatigue.

I’m a very active user; but the research I undertook appears to show that, as a traffic generator to websites, it’s poor – very poor. Regardless of the amount of users on each site, you’re four times less likely to get a clickthrough on Google+ as you are on Facebook.

Here’s a little more research – over the past month, here are the average number of page impressions per visit from a social network on Media UK:

• Twitter: 1.95
• Facebook: 2.39
• Reddit: 2.43
• Blogger: 1.95

• Google+: 1.65

So, not only are Google+ users less likely to click through in the first place, they’re also less likely to look at as many pages. That makes them doubly inefficient to service.

Since Google+ has no open posting API, it’s more time consuming to enter stuff in there; there are fewer users overall; those users click out to websites fewer times than other services, and once they get there they look at fewer pages. That might explain why most radio stations have ignored it.

(Quora users, incidentally, really like the site – 27 pages per visit on average!)