Technorati CEO Shani Higgins took to the BlogWorld stage to unveil the findings of the annual “State of the Blogosphere” survey. Technorati has been doing the report for six years, and this year’s survey is a product of over 4,000 bloggers.

One interesting find from the survey has to do with how Bloggers are embracing Google+. And the quick takeaway looks good for the burgeoning social network. But as far as how bloggers promote their content and how they drive traffic to their site, the old guard still hold sway over the blogosphere.

According to the data, 66% of professional bloggers use Google+. When you take into account all blogger, 59% use the social network. 45% of those professional blogger use Google+ primarily to promote their blogs. That number falls to 27% when you talk about all bloggers.

27% of pros have a personal Google+ account and a separate account just for their blog. 10% when it comes to all bloggers.

“A lot of them are just getting their feet wet with what Google+ has to offer,” says Shani Higgins.

That’s good news for a social network that’s still in its early days. Most bloggers said that they still primarily use Twitter to promote their blogs. The average blogger has 847 followers on Twitter, and the average pro has almost 1700.

When it comes to driving traffic to their blogs from a social media perspective, Facebook still wins out overall. It’s followed (in order) by Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Google+, Tumbr, and finally Flickr.

Google+ is obviously a new tool that bloggers are embracing, but from what we see here, it clearly hasn’t reached its full potential when it comes to usefulness to bloggers.

Here are some other interesting statistics about the makeup of today’s blogging world:

• 61% are hobbyists – the rest are professionals
• 59% are male, down from 64% last year
• It’s a young crowd, with 2/3 between the ages of 18 and 44
• 79% have a college degree
• 1/3 have an income of over 75K a year, 1/4 over 100K
• half of the blogosphere has been blogging for four years or more
• 1/3 of bloggers work in mainstream media and blog separately

As a blogger, what social media outlets do you find the most beneficial? Do you like to use Google+ to promote your blog? Let us know in the comments.

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