Recently, Google+ made a small but interesting update to their pages. Every profile page now includes the total number of times the user’s content has been seen by others. This new number is the sum of all of the views of the user’s profile, posts and photos since October 2012.
Here’s how it looks on the profile page, below the profile photo and next to the follower count:
Again, this number is the total of views for every post, photo and profile view. This could be a user seeing it in their feed or actually going to your profile page and scrolling through the posts and/or photos.
Google+ has more than 540 million active users, as opposed to the 1 billion active users on Facebook. Displaying this new metric could be part of an effort to emphasize activity on the network. Google+ isn’t always the first social media item on the menu for most people, however there are many ways it can benefit your business.
Google+ makes your view count visible to everyone by default, but you can change this setting to make it private. You can do that in your profile settings. To start, open Google+ and click the ‘Home’ button in the upper left corner. Then click ‘Settings’ and scroll to ‘Profile.’ (Shown below.)
Additionally, this update may be a hint that Google could also start including your Google+ numbers in Google Analytics at some point in the future. We’ll have to wait and see!
What do you think about the new Google+ profile views?
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