replied to your post
“I would be surprised if at least half that g+ number wasn’t just…”
Good thing all of those services have strong incentives to report completely accurate, non-inflated numbers and work tirelessly to remove bots from their networks.
I’ve seen Brands™ make hiring decisions based solely on a poor investigation of their social media statistics which told them that their audience in ${SPECIFIC_COUNTRY} was through the roof. So what did they do? They hired people to make content for that country. What they didn’t realize was that the activity wasn’t actually being created by people but by fairly sophisticated botnets.
Think about that for a second. Money is being spent translating and localizing content in order to serve it to groups of bots.