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.