Google Plus: Why My Clients Complain

My long-term suspicion stands: that Google Plus wants to get a piece of Facebook’s pie or even get the same pie, i.e. draw all gazillion Facebook members into Google Plus. I don’t think anyone can realistically expect people to cancel their Facebook account (wouldn't it be awesome though!!), but it is quite realistic to expect that people will be using Google Plus equally or even more frequently than Facebook – eventually.

For that, Google just needs to get businesses to figure out that being on Google Plus affects your SEO ranking in the upward direction. Right now it does not seem to be the case (you can’t be that obvious!), but with time, I am pretty sure it will be. it won't be immediately apparent though, Google would have the correlation burred in some interesting statistic, e.g. how many followers you have who also "plused" your articles and liked it on Facebook - or something like that. 

For the time being, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn  and Google Plus are more or less equally “valued” by Google Bot – but just wait and see, with time Google Plus will give you more SEO value than the rest. Advertising on Google Plus is also guaranteed to be highly effective.

Eventually, with time, Google Plus will be equally important to people as Facebook, and small independent businesses like my Joomla Bliss will need to spend even more time generating content and pasting it from one site to another to “share”.

While we agree that user “shares” and "tweets" and “likes” are a good measure of quality and success for information-based businesses, such as a newspaper or review magazine or radio station or educational program, for example; it is not a good measure for many OTHER type of businesses.

For us, we just don’t have a lot of news that we feel are worthy of sharing with others every day or several times a day for that matter: work is work, support is support, Ottawa is Ottawa, and web design is web design.

For Google Plus to take off, they need to can the current interface team and hire new (or better old) guys. Google Plus interface is so poorly designed it is hard to believe, especially because Google’s early fame started out with the high quality of its amazingly simple and intuitive interface (AdWords, Google Analytics, the search engine results itself). What happened and why this has changed – we can only speculate, we have no connections inside Google.

But here is what my clients commented they don't like about Google Plus interface:

• Those “hangouts” and “circles” and “extended circles”…c'mon, we are not all teenagers, you know. Trying hard to be different, but in the end…poor choice of terminology that confuses everybody and requires the use of the Help page.
• You must have a personal account on Google Plus before you can create a business account. Even Facebook lets you create a business profile page without creating a personal page
• You can only upload your contacts into your personal account and hope that they will be available inside your business account.
• You don’t see the items you’ve “plused” from the inside your own account until you go into your account and create a “post” by “sharing what’s new”. 
• Editing info is tricky, you must pay careful attention, because if you don’t, and if you happen not to notice what mode you are in, you will not be able to edit your business information. You need to get into the “view as yourself” mode. Surely, why bother to display an Edit button and THEN let users see what mode they are in. We all should learn how to read the developers' mind instead.
• The navigation and the structure..oh dear. Flat, of course, to be on par with the recent web design trends. And as a result very confusing. LinkedIn is a modern site, but it does have a hierarchical and logical navigation and post people don't find it confusing. 

Personally, I am totally happy with using LinkedIn – a professional network where I can look for contracts, jobs, designers, meetings, connect with like-minded people and colleagues. I don’t have the need to “socialize” on Facebook and broadcast to my “friends” what I am up to every second minute of the day, especially in relation my website design business.

But it is not an option these days – you MUST use social network sites, especially Facebook, and you MUST give them all sorts of information about yourself.  Or else – you won’t get any business. I call it the age of Social Media Tyranny, and Google's release of Panda and Penguin sealed in stone - it crowned itself as the Grand Social Media Tyrant.

Don’t get me wrong, I do see a LOT of value in Social Media, personal and social. I see a lot of value in Social Media for public research, market research and analysis, opinion polls, elections, politics, consumer-oriented marketing and advertising, etc., but for businesses like mine, in our day-to-day practice, doing social media boils down to spending a lot of time creating content that might not even be of interest to others and pasting it from one social account into another with some modifications. And this is being “useful to users”? Me thinks not.

Google Plus - Facebook Minus

The much-maligned Google Plus has received copious amounts of attention in the past couple months after becoming the number-two social network in the world. A report released by GlobalWebIndex, a collection of market research on web usage conducted by London-based consultancy Trendstream, found that Google Plus had accumulated 343 million active users by January 2013, up from 90 million total users a year before. This massive surge means that Google Plus has passed Twitter (288 million active users) but is still a distant second to Facebook (693 million active users).

Speculation about Google Plus’s future growth, the end of the social network’s “ghost town” image, and rumors of “Facebook Fatigue” tended to be the topics discussed in the flurry of blog posts that followed GlobalWebIndex’s announcement. Unfortunately, little time was spent looking into the reasons why Google Plus has grown so rapidly and become a force to be reckoned with in an industry that has killed off many seemingly strong products in the past.

This is good. Facebook is a monopoly, and clearly, it is not going anywhere anytime soon. But like with any monopoly, it is good to have an opposition to it. 

At Joomla Bliss, my website design company in Ottawa, we find it hard to find time to create useful and meaningful content to our main website for our existing and prospective client, but there is also LinkedIn, Facebook and now Google Plus. And don't forget Pinterest!! We really wanted to avoid useless reproduction of the same info, but soon we will have no choice, so we will be copying and pasting snippets of texts from one place to another, like everyone else..

Facebook Home - In Your Face

Last Thursday Facebook unveiled the closest thing to a "Facebook Phone" that exists. This comes in the form of a new "family of apps" for Android, and an actual phone from HTC with the family pre-loaded. The experience is called Facebook Home.
Facebook's mission is to make your phone more about people rather than about apps (right! it has nothing to do with money or taking over the WWW space, please don't be confused here). 

The core feature of Facebook Home is the Cover Feed, which takes over as your home screen, and lets you swipe through the latest photos and updates from your Facebook News Feed. You can also interact with the posts from there (liking, commenting, etc.). 

But it doesn't end there. Notifications appear on the home screen in a visual way. All notifications will show up on the home screen as separate entries. Tapping the notification will bring up the Facebook app for further interaction.

To even access your other apps in the first place, you have to hold the image of your face that appears (see that little image of Mark Zuckerberg) and swipe it up to the appropriate place.

There is a feature called "Chatheads," which allow your Facebook and text messages to follow you through your other apps. Messages (via these little heads of your friends) will show up at the top right of your screen regardless of what app your'e in. (View image here).

Facebook chose Android because of its open source nature that allows it to take over your phone in the manner it does. It's not so easy for all operating systems. Zuckerberg specifically talked about how Apple's control over iOS simply does not allow it to offer this kind of experience on an iPhone. It would take a partnership for that to happen. 

Facebook already does have a relationship with Apple. As you may recall, Apple touted heavy Facebook integration in the latest version of iOS. Here's what Zuckerberg had to say about Home on iOS in an interview with Fortune:

We'd love to offer this on iPhone, and we just can't today, and we will work with Apple to do the best experience that we can within what they want, but I think that a lot of people who really like Facebook — and just judging from the numbers, people are spending a fifth of their time in phones on Facebook, that's a lot of people. This could really tip things in that direction. We'll have to see how it plays out.

Of course only a select few Android users even get access to Facebook Home at this point. It's only launching on a handful of phones, which is somewhat ironic given Facebook's desire to have it on every phone. It's coming to the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III and Samsung Galaxy Note II, as well as the newly introduced HTC First, which features Facebook Home pre-installed.

For developers, Facebook has created some new opportunities with Home. The Cover Feed feature lets users access app content as soon as they turn on their phones. More on that here.

For businesses, not only will your Page's posts and photos be more readily available to users due to the in-your-face nature of Facebook Home, but Zuckerberg says ads will be coming to the feature at some point.

Another thing that could make Facebook Home more useful to both users and businesses is the eventual addition of Graph Search. Graph Search has not even been launched on mobile devices yet, and it remains to be seen how long that will take. It will happen, however. Facebook said as much when that was introduced. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land quotes Zuckerberg from the Home launch:

A famous SEO expert Danny Sullivan makes a good point in that same article in that Facebook Home makes users have to work harder to get to the search experiences on their devices. Just as users have to take an extra step to access their apps, they have to take an extra step to get to the search function (which could very well turn people off of the offering on its own).

Fortune goes so far as to call Android "Facebook's new weapon against Google" because of Facebook Home; the point being that Google wants you to live in Google's world and use Google's services when you're on an Android device, and Facebook Home puts you squarely in Facebook's world, distancing you more from Google's products even on its own operating system. It's a fair point, and it's really a similar (but more in your face) strategy to what Amazon is doing with its Kindle Fire devices, which use Amazon's version of Android and its own app store. 

If Facebook is able to get a substantial amount of people using Facebook Home, even if only on Android, it might push Graph Search even further into users' search habits, especially if it's available on their devices in less steps than a Google search. 

Source: WebProNews

Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, our verdict: there is no escape, if you have not done so yet, you might as swore your allegiance to Facebook now. I am secretly wondering about all this, how do people find time to Facebook? How many news do you have that are worthy of sharing? For businesses, if you already have a website and a blog, then what info do you put onto your Facebook wall, all the same content again, slightly modified? 

I find blog and facebook information of most businesses is virtually identical and identically boring. Something has to give. But I am sure it won't be Facebook. But then again, it can't be your official website either. So I guess we are all going to be copying and pasting the same meagerly important things form one place into another or using streamlining plugins to save time and efforts. 

I see blogging and facebooking can be very useful for consultants and pleasure-oriented businesses, but for B2B..blogging is a a great waste of time for the most part.