I think you are using the wrong calculation to determine "engagement levels" (whatever the heck that is). You keep saying "look he has 1.5 million followers yet

I think you are using the wrong calculation to determine "engagement levels" (whatever the heck that is). You keep saying "look he has 1.5 million followers yet he only got 50 comments on this one particular post" then you proceed to extrapolate some minuscule "engagement rating" out of that. There are a few things which I think are better indicators of engagement than comments-on-a-post / followers. 1) I would instead look at how many people he engaged with over the lifetime of his G+ activity. Or if you insist on analysing individual posts, then try to determine what percentage of the segment that the post was intended for responded to the post in some way. I bet not all of his 1.5 million followers are American, or iPhone users, or Android developers, or photographers... or any number of factors you could use to segment your audience. 2) How are you comparing your chosen metrics to other platforms? Does Twitter or Facebook have better or worse engagement? I just checked out his Facebook profile and that same Golden Gate National Cemetery that got him a measly 54 comments on G+, earned him only 2 comments on Facebook (one of which was Scoble's reply to the first and really the only comment). So while he seems to be getting even crappier results on Facebook, I don't think anyone could say that Facebook is a ghost-town. Perhaps it would be valid to say that internet just sucks for marketing in general... But here's a hint: In my 9-5 I am both an internet and a traditional marketer (I sell subscriptions). I can assure you that all my cost-per-order analyses heavily favour the adwords/social/SEO/e-mail campaigns to the direct-mail/fax/telemarketing campaigns. (I sell a low value product so maybe this is why my CPO leans this way. If you sell $1K-$10K products you might find that nothing replaces a phone call for value) 3) You cannot look at a single point in time and make a judgement call. You should look at the trend-changes over a longer period of time. Skate where the puck is going to be and all that jazz. 4) Quality of engagement is important too. A response which consists of at least one or two sentences that add something meaningful to the discussion and illicit another response from somebody else is a 100 times more valuable then an endless stream of "Cool! Thanks for posting."