While Google Plus is still in its beta phase, the newest social media forum is already slated to give Facebook a run for its money. For now, the site is invitation only and loosely restricted. As it continues to roll out at a controlled pace, many businesses are looking into its potential for social media marketing. Here’s a quick glimpse into how it works and its potential impact on the Social Media landscape.
How it works: While many have described this space as a mashup of Twitter and Facebook, the new site has a superior feature: users can easily separate family, friends and co-workers. “Circles” are easily populated by dragging and dropping online acquaintances into each appropriate group. Once established, the user can then pick and choose which group he or she cares to interact with. Google+ Hangouts, an equally progressive feature, enables up to ten people to teleconference with each other by video.
Marketing Potential: The Google plus button, comparable to the Facebook ‘like’ or thumbs up feature, actually counts as a public stamp of approval. When contacts within the user’s circle “plus one” an article or site, Google automatically stores that recommendation into a tab located in the user’s google plus page. Now that users are able to recommend and rank online content, SEO may be heavily formed by this data in the near future. While ads are not yet incorporated to the current version of Google+, the possibility of campaigns could provide much greater targeting capabilities thanks to the natural grouping caused by “Circles.”
What are your thoughts on Google+? Have you had the opportunity to tour the parameters yet?
