According to Experian Hitwise data, Google+ has a notable Asia Pacific market, wherein Singapore has recorded the highest share of visits. The measured report is for a period of eight weeks which start from July 2011 to August 2011 and compared the share of visits country-wise under the category of social networking and forums. The findings can be summarized as follows:
Singapore:- the growth rate of Google+ has been on a new high in Singapore as its percentile peaked at 1.2% share of visit for the week which ended on August 27. the rate had gradually adopted itself from a mere 0.8% for the week ended July 16. Hitwise even noted that Singapore was the only country which recorded a continual growth in visits after the launch of Google+ beta. However, the popularity of Google+ here can be attributed to the dominance Google has had in Singapore as it stands at almost 34% of upstream traffic originating from the search engine.
Surprisingly, India is at the second position in the Asian market wherein the users warm up to Google+. Percentile share of visits have however dropped majorly as time passed by. At its peak, on July 16, India had achieved 14th place with 0.4% share of visits which dropped down to 0.2% as on August 27. Here the growth of Google+ can be mainly attributed to the country’s mobile and Internet community which is rapidly growing. Hitwise even stated that the positive reception for Google’s social networking site has even been as the economy is growing and the social media popularity is increasing.
Talking about the worst ranked country for Google+, Hong Kong is the lowest ranked as it stands at the 90th position as compared to the other countries. The percentile share of visits to Google+ from Hong Kong has been recorded at 0.074% in the social networking and forums category which was recorded at the launch week of Google+. It is surprising that the percentage has neither really dropped or grown as at the end of the last week of the analysis, it was still at the same rate approximately.
The reason for continuing poor performance of Google+ can be because of the established presence of the local Chinese sites which are extensively used and are popular in the social networking category. The classification of the category noted that these Chinese forums such as Sina Weibo, Uwants and Discuss have been consuming 40% of the visits and the remaining 60% were occupied by YouTube and Facebook.
Facebook has a good hold on most of the major countries and cities in Asia Pacific which was detailed by the report. The social networking scene in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia has a strong presence of Facebook which has been strong and continues to be stronger even. This even notes that the launch of Google+ has not really affected the visits made by users to Facebook. The dominance of Google here even has not been able to get mass growth to Google+.
However, leaving Hong Kong aside, Google+ visitors have been driven by Gmail, YouTube and Google search which are a major part of Google’s own properties.