I’ve been asking a few others in the internet marketing industry what the response is to Google+, and so far it’s been very low. The publicity for the social media network has been insanely large, but users are timid about investing their time into it.
With social media management services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn there’s definitely a trust issue. Express Yourself Marketing is always looking for new and creative ways to boost our services provided to our client’s, but we choose those new internet marketing methods based on the success others have had and unfortunately, Google+ is so fresh, no one has had any success yet.
The other issue Google+ has to face is their targeted demographic group. Who will be their average user? For our B2B clients, we use LinkedIn as the main social media avenue so as a social media marketing firm, we need to choose social media networks that is going to successfully reach our client’s target market. We have no idea yet who the average user will be for Google+ so we don’t know which businesses will benefit from the network yet.
It’s no secret that Google Buzz was a bit of a flop (mainly due to privacy issues). Google Buzz was attempting to jump into the Twitter-like world; however, they missed the boat. Now Google+ may actually have a great shot at jumping into the social media world. The launch is being handled much differently than Google Buzz; Google+ is being operated on an invitation only basis until all the tweaks have been worked out. It’s a great idea, avoiding all the negative publicity and allowing them time to perfect their platform.
As large and popular as Google is as a corporation, they have made major internet software and marketing errors that have not only cost them a large amount of funding and time. After the flop of Google Buzz and Google Wave, Google+ has to be a success in order for Google to prove themselves as the internet king. If Google+ makes it’s way as a leader into the social media marketing community, Google will be able to re-establish itself in the internet community as a major power, yet again.
The platform seems very solid, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s going to crush Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn. Google+ has a long road ahead of them to prove themselves in the social media world.
Soon they’ll be introducing brand pages for businesses to use as branding tools…but a branding tool is useless without the proper tools to analyze and report growth statistics. Google+ is offering these brand pages with no analytical tools. This is going to be a major factor to businesses wanting to measure their ROI. From what I’ve gathered, Google+ will be a great collaborative tool for teams; however, there is no talk about adding Google Docs? Very strange as Google Docs is a collaboration tool that could be used in Hangouts (video conferences).
Once Google+ grows in popularity, it has the potential to be an extremely large business to business network. I don’t think it’s going to matter how great their platform is, their biggest challenge is going to be breaking into the social media cliché. Google+ has the potential to be large, but it will take time to develop and earn a truly worthy spot in the social media marketing community.
