16th August 2011

Google Plus a positive addition to social media

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Lets face the facts, Google and Facebook own the web and probably will do for a couple more years. Facebook is a Social Network and everything about the company is related to Social Media. Google is a search company but realizes that the future of search is social so they are investing very heavily in Google + which is really a competitor to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other Social Tools.

Google + was opened up on a limited basis over the last couple of weeks and has become the fastest growing social network platform ever with over 10 million people already signed up. So what’s it all about? Google + is broken down into the following components:

Circles– When we share out information to people we know we want to share out different information to different people. Circles allows you to group these people. For example, you might have a circle of friends and a circle of business contacts. If you want to share an interesting article you can decide which group of people you want to share it out to.

Hangout– Hangout is online video chat with a group of people. So for example, you may want to set up a hangout to discuss a night out with your friends, or have a conference call with your business colleagues.

Sparks– These are interest groups that you join. For example, if you are interested in cycling you can join an interest group with other people interested in cycling and receive information relevant to your area of interest.

Huddle– Huddle is group texting so you huddle together with a group and chat using texting on your mobile phone.

I have been using Google + over the last couple of weeks and I really like it. It’s a long way to go in terms of functionality but it’s certainly on the right track. I can see huge benefits to Google Advertising and huge growth opportunities in this area for Google. With Google + Google will know far more about you and through advertising much better targeting can be done.

So keep an eye on Google +, it will have hundreds of millions of users soon and will become another important Social tool for your business.

Do you think that Google + is a threat to Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn?