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John Danenbarger
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?
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