Why Google+ will never be the biggest social network
#socialmedia
Let’s face it, Google+ is for geeks in the same way that Twitter always was. As much as it pains me to say it, Google+ is never going to attract the numbers of “normal” people that Facebook has, not until Google change a few things. Perhaps, this isn’t a huge issue as Google+ doesn’t want to directly compete with Facebook. Eric Schmidt recently said-
“It is not just a question of competing with Facebook. The information allows Google to be better and that is our objective.” – http://to.iag.me/tHiKeA
That’s not exactly a declaration of war against Facebook, not even close. Facebook for many has more similarities with Twitter. I’d call Google+, Twitter on steroids. I love it- it allows me to target my posts to different streams of people and to put richer content. Well, almost, and that brings me to the main point of this post…
Friends & Public posts
OK, I am a geek, but there are many other sides to my personality. I am also a professional singer, musician, amateur photographer, and I love connecting to my friends. I can target different posts to different types of people very easily on Google+ by posting to different circles. However, I want the majority of my non-personal posts to be public. I tend to post on social media, SEO, tech and web development related stuff. I want this to be public as I think it is relevant to people searching on the web, on Google, and it is a good way for people to come across me and for my exposure in search engine ranking pages. The problem is, if all my Facebook friends (which are nearly all non-geeks) were to migrate over to Google+, they’d end up getting bombarded with my geeky posts because they’d all be public.
I don’t know how Google sort this out, and I don’t know if they have any desire to either. They could add a “minus circle” feature, where you exclude certain circles from posts. I, personally would love that feature. However, if a post is public then it would be a little strange if certain circles would no longer see them. It would also end up making Google+ more complicated. An other way would be for us to add hashtags to geeky posts (could be #geeky, #socialmedia, #tech or anything) and then if Google had a way for users to block posts with certain hashtags, then friends could block such posts. I wouldn’t be a fan of this as it would require non-geeky friends knowing how to do that- and which hash tags would they block?
Perhaps Google+ could create a special circle called “Friends” that had special powers! If you added someone to the friends circle, you’d only see posts from that person tagged as “friends” (either by a hashtag or by including their friends circle). Again, too complicated.
I don’t know the answer to this, but I think it is a huge problem. And that means, that I’ll be keeping my Facebook account- since the majority of my friends connect with me there.
I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this one!
