UPDATED : Will Google+ win the battle against Facebook, twitter and maybe even other social media channels ?
Need a Google+ / Googleplus invite? Please e-mail me your gmail-adres and I’ll send an invite!
I’ve added some updates (please scroll down).
Google has tried and failed to strengthen its position as a major player in the realm of social media. Google Wave and Google Buzz were (sometimes clumsily) launched and failed to raise applause from social media users.
Can Google+ ‘win’ the battle against Facebook and Twitter (and other social media channels)? In the last few years they (Twitter and Facebook) have already gained an enormous user-base and have established a solid market-share and Google+ has yet to prove itself to the social media community.
So at this time it’s to early to answer the question if Google+ will win the battle against the current ‘social media giants’ but the signs are certainly there.
Basically Google took all the best elements of currently existing platforms and combined them into their new social media en-devour Google+.
But they did more. Especially the way to group contacts is extremely smart. You can put your contacts in ‘ circles ‘ grouping them by, for example “family”, “business contacts” and “friends”.
But there’s (much) more why I think that Google+ is an interesting new platform:
- you can add photos, QR codes, links and much more interesting rich-media information to your ‘about’ page
- you get unlimited storage on Picasa (Google’s photo and video sharing platform – should Flickr be worried?)
- search results (SEO) could be hugely impacted in the future by using Google+
- Google+ is seamlessly integrated with their mobile platform Android (Iphone/Ipad apps in the future?)
- the free live video-chat feature (possible with multiple users) makes Google+ stand out from Facebook and is a very interesting option
- the stream of posts from you and your Google+ friends looks a bit like a combination between Facebook and Twitter (best of both worlds)
- option to show posts per circle
- if you have location enabled on your mobile device Google+ can create circles ‘nearby’ (interesting feature for location based marketing)
- ‘sparks’ option; a (currently) small selection of topics showing you posts about the interest-field you’ve selected
- potential for growth is enormous because Google can easily expand their system with for example social bookmarks, a ‘quora-like’ Q&A feature and of course their own services like Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Music etc.
- the search engine let’s you find people easily and adding new friends to your circles is as easy as counting from 1 to 3
through implementation of Google’s “Google Wallet” payment system it could well become an interesting e-merce and/or crowd-funding platform
So there we have it. A long list of interesting Google+ features that should trigger other social media platform to better follow their new competitor very closely.
BUT Google+ is still in bèta… Only people invited by current Google+ users can join (if you need an invite please contact me). And even then you might be in for a wait because Google opens and closes the ‘doors’ to their new platform as they please.
Of course the staggering numbers of users that platforms like Facebook and Twitter have will not be reached by Google+ as long as the platform is still in bèta but in my opinion they just might have just finally struck ‘social media gold’ with this new platform.
As a social media marketeer I’ll keep experimenting with this new platform to try out the unique features of Google+ and see how they could be suitable for our clients. I think it is an interesting addition to the already (very) wide range of social media channels.
Keep in mind that social media channels come and go (sometimes very fast) but I think Google+ is here to stay.
If you are already on Google+ please connect with me (http://plus.google.com/104089034994416821424) or search for ” Christian Fictoor ” via the Google+ search option.
Hope to welcome you in one of my circles !
UPDATES: Because Javascript embedding is disabled here please visit my personal blog to see all updates:
UPDATE july 11th: Google+ big succes, claims “Millions” of users already (audio interview with Eric Schmidt (Google)
UPDATE july 11th : Infographic comparing Facebook and Google+
UPDATE juli 9th : Added Google+ statistics box
UPDATE july 8th : Google+ announced that it will launch company pages (somewhat like Facebook fanpages) in about two weeks, in the meantime G+ asks companies not to join Google+ under their company name.
UPDATE july 6th : I’ve added a video tour by Lifehacker.com
UPDATE juli 5th: Ford Europ runs first brand competition on Google+ (read the full article by @gordonmacmillan here).
