According to ICM Research, Google+ has attracted between four and five per cent of the online adult population in Britain among the 40 million global users Google claims to have signed up.
ICM polled 32,000 UK adults about their awareness of and usage of Google's social network service and found 61 per cent of them had heard of it. Around 17 per cent of respondents claimed to use it but further investigation by ICM revealed only a third of them were actually using it and the remainder were mistaking it for something else.
Richard Bussy, project director at ICM, said: 'This tells us that Google+ doesn't yet have the saliency required to be treated as a mainstream social media website.'
But he added: 'As brands enter Google+ ... awareness of the site will rise.'