With the recent launch of Google+, Google’s new social network, marketers will soon have a new tool at their disposal; but will it ever be more powerful than Facebook?
Google’s new social network was introduced to the world on June 28 and just 21 days later had over 20 million visits worldwide – a rate of growth much larger than that of Facebook, Twitter or MySpace over the same time period. Online trends expert comScore have also noticed an increase in user ‘stickiness’ to the social network in recent weeks, with users spending significantly more time on Google+ now than immediately after its inception. These statistics can’t help but attract the attention of any business interested in advertising its brand online.
In the near future Google will be launching its own version of Facebook’s pages, where marketers will be able to set up their own dedicated brand pages as they currently do on Facebook. Should, as anticipated, Google+ increase in popularity enough to rival Facebook as the world’s most popular social network, marketers may possibly have an even better weapon in their arsenal.
When launched, the new Google+ brand pages could possibly have a number of interesting features. The page may feature Google’s +1 button, similar to Facebook’s ‘like’ button, however users may be able to +1 a brand’s official website right from the Google+ brand page rather than just simply liking the brand page as done on Facebook. This may add a real benefit to the brand owner, allowing more +1s to their official website and therefore benefitting from a better ranking in Google’s organic search results. This is a recent addition to Google’s search that gives search results a social element. Google will start giving more importance to websites, blogs and content created by your friends or web content that has been recommended or shared by others using the new +1 button.
Google+ brand pages may also feature account verification, allowing Google to determine whether a profile is genuine and reflect this on the brand page, similar to the way Twitter do. The brand page may also allow brands to segment their audience into Circles which will be a great way of distinguishing between groups of fans, like employees, brand managers, customers, VIP fans and so on.
One thing which Google will have to their advantage is that they can offer far better search integration than Facebook can. Marketers advertising their Facebook page on search engines generally have a problem with their click-through rate, most probably due to the irrelevance of the domain with the search criteria. Google can obviously remedy this and maybe even provide some sort of benefits to Google+ brand pages. This advantage is good news for Google, especially since they already have 60 percent of the search market.
Furthermore, Google will almost certainly have better page usage analytics. Anyone who has used Google Analytics before will immediately know how detailed they are. One can view detailed reports on where your users come from, what content they like viewing most, how long they’ve spent on your website, which sites refer the most visitors to your website and what your visitors are searching for when looking for a site like yours. It is unthinkable that Google will not use this technology when launching their brand pages. These usage reports will provide marketers with a powerful way of analysing their pages and improving their users’ experience by tweaking and modifying their content.
Google also has the benefit of hindsight when it comes to social media. It can learn from where other social media have failed. It knows Facebook’s shortcomings and has the experience to take advantage of its slip-ups. It has provided users with a different, simpler, user experience to that of Facebook, as well as some interesting features like Circles and Hangouts.
At the end of the day, the real measure of success will be whether Google+ can get close to matching Facebook’s audience of more than 750 million active users worldwide. That said, Google’s already massive Gmail user base (over 200 million users), its search engine market dominance and industry leading AdWords product are likely to be important ingredients in the recipe for social networking success.
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