Hangouts Makes Google + A Social Place
Google + launched in September 2011 and quickly became one of the largest social media platforms in the world. Anthony Myers

Going public was probably a good thing for Google+, as a recent market research report shows its social media market share is closing in on LinkedIn and MySpace.

Market research company Experian Hitwise said Google+ saw a 1,269 percent increase in its social media market share last week.

In just one week, Google+ went from ranking as 54th most visited site in our Social Networking and Forums category to 8th place, the researcher's stated.

Google+ had 15 million visits to its site the week of Sep. 24, raising its profile in the top 10 most popular social networking sites. That's a category ruled by Facebook, which had about 1.8 billion visits last week, according to Reuters.

Should Google+ continue to grow like this, it will be in a position knock down the likes of MySpace and Linkedin very soon. Facebook may be way out of reach for now as it has 750 million active users.

Google+ initially enticed mainly college students, who are deemed early adopters, but is now attracting a wider population.

Reuters noted that the research company separated the consumers into fun groups. However, while Google+ was initially attractive to those in Colleges and Cafés and University Town, it has grown to Bohemian Groove and Hispanic Hospitality, the article stated.

An Experian Hitwise spokesperson told Reuters that the popularity of Google features such as Gmail, YouTube and search should lead to more people using the site.

Google+ was unveiled to the world last Tuesday. Prior to the public launch, users had to get invitation to join. The search engine giant said it made 100 improvements since releasing the social network for field trial in June.

For the past 12 weeks we've been in field trial, and during that time we've listened and learned a great deal, Google's Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra said in a blog post. We're nowhere near done, but with the improvements we've made so far we're ready to move from field trial to beta... Anyone can visit google.com/+, join the project and connect with the people they care about.

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