• The Next Web, Thursday, February 9, 2012 11:50 AM

In the face of broad criticism, Google+ saw impressive growth toward the end of 2011, according to new data from traffic analyst Compete. Remarkably, Google’s social network saw nearly half as many unique visitors as Twitter did in December of 2011. To be precise, Compete says that Twitter had 40,411,065 unique visitors during that month, and Google+ had a very sold 20 million.

“After seeing a slight dip in visitors in October of last year, it looks like Google+ righted the ship and had a strong end of the year,” notes The Next Web -- “which is good news for Google, since it’s clearly putting all of its social eggs into the Google+ basket.” Not only that, but the service has recently come under fire for its heavy integration with Google search. As such, it needs all the consumer support it can get.

In addition to Google+ becoming more popular as a social destination, Compete said its +1 feature -- which is embedded on a variety of blogs and other external sites -- saw a rise in popularity as well. The subdomain for the +1 button saw over 40M uniques in December. Added TNW: “While the site is nowhere near the traffic that Facebook sees on a daily basis, [Google] will definitely continue to push the product forward.”

Read the whole story at The Next Web »