Google’s social network, Google+, has been making headlines over the past few weeks.
Firstly, the integration of personalized search results with public search results was announced with the introduction of Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World.’ Then, last week, Google CEO Larry Page announced that Google+, launched just 7 months ago, had already reached 90m users.
So are Google, Twitter et al on the wane and should marketer’s be switching their focus to Google+? There are plenty of reasons to justify such a view. But first, let’s look at how Google has integrated personalized results from Google+ into its search results.
With the roll out of ’Search Plus Your World’, users who are logged into Google will not only see the ‘public’ search results from people they don’t know, but relevant content – posts, videos and photos – that has been made public or shared with them by their Google+ connections. Those results will be clearly flagged as personal and can be switched off at any time using a simple toggle.
In addition, for those signed in, Google+ profiles will be part of the search query box. So those looking for people will find their search box populated with people with the same/similar names from their Google+ network or similar people who they might be interested in following.
Finally, when conducting searches, signed in Google users will find Google+ people profiles and pages related to that particular search delivered alongside their search results. These results may appear irrespective of whether the searcher is signed into Google, although if they are, those profiles can be added to their Google+ network directly from the search results page without needing to switch to Google+ first.
These 3 changes make a social network a 10th the size of Facebook leap in importance, and here’s why.
The benefits of creating a Google+ page, growing its following and creating search optimised content that others share suddenly becomes more important for brands because of the integration with that great business driver for premium and luxury brands – search.
The more Google+ followers a brand has, the more likely that brand’s content is going to be shared and the more likely that content will appear in the personalised searches of those followers and their connections, driving more traffic to the brand’s site. And the more content that brand creates on its area of specialism and shares with its followers, the more likely it makes it that the brand’s Google+ profile will appear in the recommended people and pages profiles within a Google search – increasing its Google+ following and its potential network of sharers and their connections.
An active and popular Google+ presence has the potential to become a key plank of search strategy. And as search is a more proven business driver for premium and luxury brands than social media, there is potentially a more direct link between social media activity and commercial returns than has been proven to date on Facebook or Twitter.
So should brands be prioritising Google+ at the expense of their Facebook and Twitter profiles? Not yet, and that’s for 2 key reasons.
Firstly, marketers need to be where their consumers are and at present their consumers are much more likely to be on Facebook and (to a much lesser extent) on Twitter. The success of these new ideas depends very much on how consumers react to personalized search and whether enough are attracted by the benefits to create Google+ accounts and use them as their primary profile for connecting and sharing. Google+ is growing fast but a proportion of its 90m users will have signed up because they’re using other Google services such as gmail rather than because their aiming to use it as their primary social network.
Secondly, this may be part of a game Google is playing with Facebook to increase its access to Facebook social graph data to enhance it’s own search results. Or indeed Google may be forced to integrate more of Facebook’s and Twitter’s social graph results into its search by antitrust legislators concerned at the extent to which Google is promoting its own product. If Facebook is happy to supply more of its data to Google to fuel social search results, and Google is happy to integrate that data, then the reasoning for a Google + presence becomes less strong.
Our advice wouldn’t be to ‘wait and see’, however. As we’ve advised in the past, we think brands should be setting up Google+ brand pages and beginning to post content optimised for search, even if re-purposed from existing Facebook and or Twitter posts. They should also integrate Google sharing buttons on their sites if they haven’t already.
Then, they need to watch their follower stats and natural search traffic carefully and use that as a guide to how Google+ is impacting their business. If Google+ does take off as a result of these new developments, it’s going to pay off most handsomely for those brands that aren’t playing catch up.
