Introduction to Google+

A new social media platform launched three weeks ago that is going to change our approach to social media marketing. You may have thought you had this one down: you blog, you tweet, you have a micro site on Facebook and then, technology leaps forward and it’s time to rethink the mix. Let us talk you through it…

First, what’s so different about Google+?

Essentially Google+ is very much like Facebook and Twitter, arguably an amalgamation of the best features of both. The key difference is in a tool called Circles which essentially lets you categorise your contacts, and allows for asymmetric sharing of information across these categories – you therefore have greater control over your privacy, selecting who sees what, and the beauty is that this also works in reverse so that you don’t see every piece of information that all your contacts post, resulting in a refreshingly streamlined News stream!

What does this mean for the competitors?

Facebook no longer has the monopoly on social networking. The functionality of circles on Google+ doesn’t integrate into their current system, to adapt they are going to have to invest in some serious back-end development. Facebook has a phenomenal amount of users, but they have been users without any viable alternative. Whilst Facebook are a single-service company, one billion people already use one of Google’s other products which seamlessly integrate with Google+. For example Google+ impacts Google search, it is indexed and searchable through Google and evolves directly from Gmail on your user tab. Google’s shares have jumped 12% since the release, 36% this quarter.

What Google+ lacks is advertising, company landing pages and third party developer platforms, however all these features are in development.

Twitter has a fight on it’s hands too. Google has taken it’s follow model and offered a way of sharing more than 140 characters to organised hordes, with the facility for extended conversation with each other around the content. Google has also withdrawn a substantial fee that it paid Twitter in order to be allowed to include Twitter stream in Google search results. We may see Twitter being marginalized and used only for anonymous dialogs, as twitter accounts do not have to be linked to a real individual or name (unlike Facebook and Google+).

So how does this affect your company?

Preparation is key, companies need to be aware that many of their customers will be moving to Google+, and that there maybe considerable advantages in having a presence on the platform. Official company pages haven’t yet been released, though a few organisations have managed to shoe-horn themselves into personal profiles with promising results. Shortly, company pages will be released, with numerous speculations already circulating of how features could be used. For example, circles could allow marketeers to segment fans into categories like ‘evangelisers’, ‘sharers’ and ‘nonsharers’, and target their communications accordingly; ‘hangouts’ a facility for multiple video calls, could be utilised as audience engagement platforms, customer service tools and enhanced feedback loops.

We’re watching the growth of the network and the development of the company pages closely to keep our clients on the cutting edge of social media. We are looking forward to proving our design and development skills in a new arena and evolving our social media marketing campaigns to include this exciting new platform.