Google+ Goes Mainstream in 6 Weeks. What's Next?

The tech industry has obsessively clocked the progress of Google's (GOOG) social networking effort, Google+, since the service launched in late June. So far, the metrics have focused on how many people have adopted, or at least tried, the service.

Experian Hitwise has an interesting analysis based on the types of users on the service. According to that data, Google+ has already begun to move into mainstream users, suggesting that it has real legs and could prove a significant danger to Facebook.

Experian has started a segmentation by adoption class, loosely based on the ideas of the late Everett Rogers. Rogers said that groups of people adopted technology in waves, with innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Experian's terminology focuses on demographic groups more than adoption habits:

• colleges and cafes
• kids and cabernet
• status seeking singles
• full pockets empty nesters

There weren't definitions of all, although colleges and cafes were "young singles and recent college graduates living in college communities," while kids and cabernet were "prosperous, middle-aged married couples living child-focused lives in affluent suburbs." Below is a graph from Experian showing the adoption (click to enlarge):

Experian associates these groups with Rogers adoption concepts. Colleges and cafes tend to be innovators, and they have already peaked and started to drop:

Its not uncommon for innovators to trial new services online and in some cases abandon those services when they lose interest. As of the writing of this post, for the week ending August 6, 2011, Colleges and Cafés have dropped to an index of 73 and now make-up only 0.3% of visits to Google+.

However, remember that the number of people using Google+ has grown tremendously. According to comScore, the service had 25 million users the first week of August, just over a month from opening, compared to Facebook and Twitter taking more than two years each to reach that point. (Perhaps the early adopters are getting diluted within the larger pool.)

According to Experian, a group that is growing in its use of Google+ is kids and cabernet, which the company sees as one part of early mainstream:

Currently, Kids and Cabernet index at 268 in their visits to Google+, and make-up 2.9% of visits to the site. Interestingly, when we look at this segment's stats for visits to Facebook, they index at a mere 68 and make up less than 0.7% of visits to the leading social network.

The more mainstream use that Google+ can garner, the greater chance it has to become a dominant social network. According to market research firm YouGov, Google+ will eat into Facebook's user base and is moving toward becoming the second largest social network in the U.S. by next year. The degree of regular use is also high.

And Google just began rolling out games as part of Google+, which means that a major driver of traffic and use hasn't even come into play. Mainstream, indeed.

Related:

• The Social-Media Race: It's Down to Facebook, Google and Microsoft
• Who Needs to Worry About Google+? LinkedIn, Not Facebook
• Hey, What the Hell Is Happening at Google? And Why Did It Take So Long?
• Facebook Desperation Watch: Trying to Lock Out Google+

Image: Flickr user justinbaeder, CC 2.0. Erik Sherman

Erik Sherman is a widely published writer and editor who also does select ghosting and corporate work. The views expressed in this column belong to Sherman and do not represent the views of CBS Interactive. Follow him on Twitter at @ErikSherman or on Facebook.

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