Another great article from my good friend, speaker and social media guru, Dave Nelsen.
He's so smart!!
On
a single day in early March, two compatriots independently sent me
different articles about Google+. The story from CNN Money was titled,
“Google+ is about to be broken up.” The piece from The Independent (a UK
publication) was titled, “Google Plus might be dead, as ‘Streams’ and
‘Photos’ take its place.”
As
a devoted Apple fan I find it rather odd to be helping tout Google,
Apple’s archenemy in mobile. Google ‘stole’ countless ideas from Apple’s
iOS (aka iPhone operating system) for their Android operating system
and today powers more than 6-times as many smartphones globally as
Apple. Of course tablets (iPads, which also run iOS) are a different
story, still favoring Apple.
For
whatever reason - probably because everybody likes to see big successes
(people or companies) stumble - these articles present the Google+
“evolution" as negative news. The Germans have a specific word for the
secret delight that we all take in seeing another’s misfortunes:
Schadenfreude.
But is Google+ really failing?
Perhaps
you’re familiar with compete.com (aka an independent, third-party
measurement service) that tracks unique monthly visitors to virtually
all websites. According to compete.com between February 2014 and January
2015 (the most recent data available as I write) Google+
(plus.google.com) grew by almost 40% and now exceeds 65 million monthly
users (about 20% of the US population).
Also
according to compete.com, after peaking in March 2014 Facebook.com
visitors actually declined by 4% through January 2015. It now looks like
a definite down trend. Yes, according to these stats Facebook is still
2.5 times larger than Google+, but a year ago Facebook was more than 3.5
times bigger. Of course this is just one measure; it doesn’t tell the
whole story (level of engagement, etc.). Still, Google+ doesn’t exactly
look dead to me.
Breaking
up is not the same thing as being dead. In fact, it looks like Facebook
is breaking up too. Have you noticed that Facebook never integrated
Instagram (a $1B purchase) or WhatsApp (a $22B acquisition)? At the same
time Facebook now offers an enhanced news feed as a separate app
(Paper) ... and their texting function as yet another separate app
(Messenger). I now use these various apps far more than Facebook.com.
Facebook
and Google+ are both doing essentially the same thing ... not because
they’re failing, but because all businesses must adapt to the mobile
revolution. They’re being driven by the tsunami of smart mobile devices,
which now outsell traditional computers by 6-1 (and are pulling away). I
predict that someday Google+ and Facebook will be held up together as
models of leaders that made the early transition - from the web to
mobile - that all winning companies will make to survive.
Google
clearly cares deeply about succeeding in “social” (Google+ is their
fourth try, following Orkut, Wave, and Buzz) and they have awesome
market power. You would ignore Google+ (or the resulting collection of
social/mobile/communication apps that evolve from it) at your company’s
peril because Google also dominates mobile (Android), search and video,
services that are together evolving under a new umbrella called Google
“My Business.”
Remember
that half of all Internet traffic starts with a search. Google will
happily send traffic to your competitors if not to you. Even as an Apple
fan, I plan to be Google’s friend too.
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