Digital Marketing Consultant

Google’s recent announcement that it is going to be retiring a bunch of its products has got people wondering.  If the company is prepared to kill off Wave after less than two years — a tool that Techcrunch described as one of the most ambitious products it had ever seen — will the company one day pull the plug on Google+?

Those banging the drum for the social network’s demise point out that membership has flattened out.  After racing to 40 million members in the months since its launch, activity on the site has remained relatively stable.  People who use social media rushed to join and see what all the fuss was about, but it does not appear that mainstream users have been tempted by the promise of Circles to abandon Facebook for the Google competitor.

So give it another year or two and we should be waving goodbye to Google+.

But perhaps not!  And whether we should celebrate its demise is questionable.

Sure, the thought of having to use yet another social network to market products is unlikely to make many sellers happy.  And the idea that markets might be fragmented across different platforms is always going to mean more work for the same results.  But Google+ did bring some valuable new tools to the social marketing field.

The ability to build Circles, Google+’s main advantage, is a powerful marketing device.  It might have been created with the idea of allowing members to separate the posts they want their friends to see from the posts they want their relatives to read, but it also allows marketers to segment their lists.  

That is hugely valuable.

Being able to ensure that particular posts are only read by the people most likely to respond to them will help to ensure maximum conversion rates.

How frequently firms are doing this is hard to say.  Companies have not started releasing figures and it may be too early anyway to build enough data to draw conclusions about the strategy’s effectiveness.  But while it should yield better conversions, it will mean significantly more effort: organizing the Circles; monitoring activities in each of those Circles; and creating different posts for each of those groups of buyers.

Should Google+ fail and the market stay concentrated solely on Facebook, it could save us all a lot of effort.

But it is unlikely to happen.  Not just because Google has so much invested in Google+.  And not just because the search company cannot easily do without its own social media platform at a time when Facebook pages are as important as website URLs.

It is unlikely to happen because Facebook has already started copying many of the biggest new features that Google+ brought to social media.

Subscriptions and lists might not be as user-friendly as Circles but they do the same thing: they allow users to read posts from people — and brands — they don’t know; and they allow marketers to send different messages to different groups of people.

And, one more thing: Google is not finished building Google+ and its social media marketing strategies.   I think we should look for some positive surprises ahead.   What do you think?

So Google+ has now opened up to business pages. Companies can create pages, just as they can on Facebook, sit in a Circle with other favored corporations and interact with customers through discussions, posts and images. 

For owners of small businesses, it is a huge headache.

And it is not just that writing posts for Google+ and monitoring activity on the site is another draw on our time. It is that we have to learn how to do it. Google+ is new, so there are few case studies to look at and no figures to see which kinds of posts draw the biggest responses. While it is likely that the biggest influencers on Twitter and Facebook are also likely to be the most dominant on Google+, that is not certain. Until your Google+ page is up and running, you cannot be sure which of your followers are (notice I optimistically use the plural) most likely to spread the word, pass on your updates and take part in your discussions.

Google has now given us all a whole new learning curve to ride.

That is the bad news. The good news is that those marketers whose background included time in a traditional sales environment have an advantage.

It may not look that way. Facebook is now seven years old so many of those leaving college and starting careers in marketing will have been using the site since their mid-teens. To them, social media is as familiar an environment as the local park, and as challenging a tool as an old-fashioned feature phone. 

But take a look at Toyota’s Google+ page. Sure, the company has used the layout of photos at the top of the page to create a single image (just as some smart Facebookers have done). But look at the posts. There is lots of talk of “we” and “our.” When someone asks when he can expect to see the new Rav4s, the response is personal:

“Hi Jeremy. You'll see the '12 RAV 4s towards the end of December. Thanks for the post. ^RF”

This is not hi-tech wizardry, and it is got nothing to do with all of the smart things that Google+ can do that neither Facebook nor Twitter can do. This is a salesman fielding an enquiry from a customer. It is a personal touch with a greeting, a first name and initials at the end that tell the reader that this is coming from a real person and not from a company.

This is a simple post that lets leads know that when they are ready to buy, someone will be there ready to help them.

That is what traditional sales people have always done. They have always answered questions, built connections and used their personalities to make them the go-to guy when the lead needed products like theirs.

Google might have given marketers a new sales vehicle to learn how to drive, but for anyone who knows what really drives sales, getting behind the wheel should not be too uncomfortable.