Google+ Adds View Counts for Profiles, Posts and Images

Think your Google+ page isn’t getting much action? Google is hoping to prove you wrong by adding view counters to its profiles, posts, and pages. Then you can at least see that people are looking at your content on the social network, even if they may not be interacting with it.

The counters, first reported on by The Next Web, are likely being used to show that Google+ holds a lot of weight in search. Even if Google+ isn’t a network you update as much as Facebook or Twitter, if someone is searching for you and they’re using Google, the odds are pretty good that the searcher will stumble onto your Google+ page.

And if people or brands believe that their profiles are getting a lot of views, they might be more inclined to spend some more time on the site. At least, that’s what Google is probably hoping for.

It’s an interesting move to say the least, and one that could easily backfire if Facebook were to come out and do the same thing. While Google+ traffic is likely nothing to scoff at, Facebook has a lot of users and a very good engagement rate. I wouldn’t be surprised if views on Facebook dwarfed those on Google+ by a significant amount.

Will Facebook come back with view counts of its own, though? That’s something to watch for.

If you’re not interested in showing off your profile, post or image view counts to the world, Google isn’t making it a requirement. A trip into the Google+ Settings area will let you disable the counts; all you have to do is uncheck the box next to “Show how many times your profile and content have been viewed.”

What do you think of the latest addition to Google+ profiles? Leave us your thoughts below in the comments section.