NASA reaches 20,000 followers on Google+ faster than it did on Twitter and Facebook

In a blog post today, NASA has shared some numbers about its recent Google+ Pages launch.

NASA has become extremely active on social media sites, including Twitter meetups at past shuttle launches and the distribution of satellite photos and news. Today, NASA sheds some light on how the Google+ Pages platform has treated them since the agency signed up.

NASA shared the following stats that include how fast it reached 20,000 followers on Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+:

We were impressed with the rapid growth of the NASA presence on the Facebook and Twitter platforms, we do have the data for each platform at the 20,000 mark. It took #NASA 469 days to reach 20,000 followers on Twitter, 276 days on Facebook, and only 4 days on Google+. As of this morning, between the three platforms, NASA has a combined reach of 2,264,854 (1,605,159 on twitter, 625,459 on Facebook, 34,236 on Google+). With NASA’s almost 35,000 followers on Google+, NASA is the third most popular non-Google page (http://socialstatistics.com/top/pages).

Currently, NASA is the number 14th most followed page on Google+ according to SocialStatistics. As the organization pointed out, they are the third most popular non-Google page on the platform.

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Statistics don’t lie, and it looks like the growth of NASA on Google+ isn’t close to stopping. Could this be because the Pages feature was just recently launched? Perhaps there will be follow fatigue and some of the brands will see a dip in the growth of following. Until then, it appears that Google+ should be a part of your company’s media sharing campaigns.

NASA points out that it’s not all about followers though. The agency has seen some impressive engagement stats, which they shared today as well:

What’s more interesting than the number of followers on the Google+ platform, is how active the community has been. In the first week of use, NASA posted 53 times to Google+. These posts generated 18,854 +1’s, 7,969 shares and 1996 comments. The most popular post was the time-lapse video from space (https://plus.google.com/u/0/102371865054310418159/posts/Bpb9wRt7SDp?hl=en)

What does this information tell us? It says that brands are willing to try new platforms to expand its footprint, and Google+ provides a user base that is hungry to interact with brands. With a combined reached of 2,264,854 people on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, NASA can push content in a way that will give them an instant return of feedback and sharing.

The one thing that still irritates me with Google+ is the fact that URL’s have no usernames in them. Profile links look like this: https://plus.google.com/102371865054310418159/posts

While it should look something more like this: http://plus.google.com/NASA.

This issue causes a bit of friction for word of mouth growth and sharing overall, since the current link structure says nothing about the user’s Google+ profile.

Have you set up a Page for your brand on Google+? Share your experiences in the comments!