We've all heard the claims that Google+ is a ghost town and that the network's population is artificially inflated, but a Forrester Research analyst says marketers are crazy to ignore it.

The analyst, Nate Elliott, based his assertion on a study of 60,000 online adults in the United States. The report found that 22% of those adults had visited Google+ within the last month.

"That’s the same number who told us they use Twitter, and more than told us they use LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Instagram," Elliott wrote. "That means you can build a real follower base on Google Plus: On average, top brands have collected 90% as many fans on Plus as on Twitter. (In fact, the brands we studied have more followers on Google Plus than on YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram combined.)"

Forrester also studied more than 3 million user interactions with more than 2,500 brand posts, and found the Google+ posts scored almost as high as those on Facebook and received almost twice as much engagement per follower as tweets from those brands:

"The bottom line? If you’re not actively marketing on Google Plus, it’s time to start," Elliott writes.

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