google+
Some people out there are predicting the death of Facebook with the advent of Google’s new social media platform Google+. It’s difficult to make predictions that strong, but then again, everybody thought that MySpace would never fail when it was supposedly valued at $12 billion, but recently sold for a mere $35 million. While Facebook will definitely have to step its game up with compelling new innovations to compete with a monster like Google+, there are just too many die-hard Facebook users to make it an easy task for Google+.
Surprisingly enough, Google+ is not Google’s first attempt at creating a social media platform. Here are some flops that I had never even heard of before digging in the dirt and doing some research: Google Buzz and Google Wave anyone? Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of these. But, Orkut, another Google venture, was largely popular in Brazil, but even that flame is beginning to burn out as well.
Google+ Features
- Google+ “circles” allows its users to categorize their friends into different circles depending on their relationship to one another: work, college, family, friends, etc. Sound familiar at all? You’ve got it Facebook’s “lists” offers the same feature as Google+ “circles”. However there is an advantage with the “circles” feature. Facebook launched its list feature a long time after the launch of the actual social media platform. Now if you sit down and try to organize all of your 900 friends into lists, it will take hours upon hours to complete. If you start this with Google+’s “circles” from the first day, then it is very doable.
- With Google+ Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. This feature lets specific friends (or entire circles) know you’re hanging out online and then gives the user the opportunity to drop by for a chat. Until teleportation arrives, it’s the next best thing.
- Tell Google Sparks what you’re into and it will send you stuff it thinks you’ll like, so when you’re free, there’s always something cool to watch, read, or share.
- Plus, there’s a group chat known as Google Huddles and the ability to instantly take photos and videos and upload to Google Circles.
The beautiful thing about Google+ is that it will allow you to access your social network and make posts from practically any website or device. Let’s admit it: EVERYTHING IS LINKED TO GOOGLE. It’s probably how you found this blog, and you might even be surfing on GoogleChrome. This makes Google+ even more linked to your web behaviors than Facebook.
What Does Google+ Mean For Marketers?
You may have already put this together, but if Google+ allows you to group your network into “circles” then every user is focusing solely on the people in their circles, posting and reading information exclusively in their circles. This makes it very easy to block out marketers on Google+. Nate Elliot makes a good point about this trend in his Forbes’ article:
“Google’s done something similar with its Gmail ‘priority inbox’ feature, and Twitter’s lists (as well as the lists features in Tweetdeck and Hootsuite) help people screen out non-essential messages as well. And fragmentation of social platforms doesn’t exactly help marketers either: The more unique social tools our customers use, the more time we spend developing for and managing different platforms.”
What do you think of Google+? Will you be using it?