Google+ referrals declining, warns Net Applications

Google+ social media referrals. Source: Net Applications, November 2011. Click for larger.

Google+ has a lot of nice things going for it and is increasingly becoming a place to micro-blog and share content outside the walled garden of Facebook. However, Google+ as a social media referral source has been declining lately, if Net Applications is to be believed. The research firm, which monitors 40,000 sites on the web, warned today that Facebook in November 2011 had a thousand times the amount of referrals as Google+, twice as much than in October.

Furthermore, history data shows that social media referrals from Google+ have actually been on a steady decline since July. As seen in the chart below, Mashable, Twitter, Reddit and LinkedIn in November all ranked higher as social media referral sources than Google+. Of course, one has to take into consideration that Google+ is a young and constantly evolving product which opened for public consumption on September 20, unlike the established social media sites it is being pitted against.

Still, Google+ referrals appear to have been constantly dropping. Back in September, Net Applications reported that Google+ referrals dropped 32 percent after a strong first month. Google+ maintained its position as the seventh leading source of social media referrals in the month of August and Mashable was a distant 13th. A month later, in November, Mashable passed Google+ which dropped to the eighth place.