Month: January 2013

This is part 5 of my blog series entitled Set Up Your Tools.

Google+ is another big player in the social media space. Google+ offers the same things that Facebook offers:

• a newsfeed
• photos – integrated with Google’s Picasa service
• events – tied in with Google’s Calendar & Hangouts tools
• communities
• and a bunch of other options like circles, local and games

Like Facebook, Google has developed a Platform that users can build upon. You can add social plugins like:

• +1 buttons – these are Google’s answer to Facebook’s “like” buttons
• badges – your Google+ profile can be embedded almost anywhere
• share – users can share your content with their “circles of friends”

And, Google+ has the customary mobile apis as well, which ensures that you can build cross-platform support for Google+.

Google+ has taken a circular route to fruition. Where Facebook started as a social platform, Google+ has grown out of a variety of tools that used to be separate and are now being weaved together as a larger fabric. This has worked well in some ways, and it has been challenging in other ways.

Google has built some really good tools (Picasa for photos) that are now being used as a key component of the Google+ experience. Google Search, Google Reader and various other Google tools also integrate quite seamlessly with the Google+ experience.

One area of confusion for some users has been Google’s permission model, referred to as Google Circles. Circles are Google’s way of allowing you to segregate your audience. You can create one circle for your family. Another for your co-workers. And a third circle for your friends that know about the gambling habit that you keep from your family and co-workers. And, you can post info to each of those circles without the other circles knowing about them. This is great for keeping your social circles up to date in one place. But it’s confusing for some. And thus, the barrier to entry can be daunting.

I love the concept of segregated user groups. The ability to share what I want with a select subset of users is fantastic. I can target my content to those that I think will be interested in it. Some of my friends that I am connected with on Facebook comment that some of my posts are too geeky for them. Targeting my content to certain circles would help in this way. This mirrors targeted advertising – another market space that Google excels in. I don’t think this “mirroring” is by accident.

Something to note: definitive stats are hard to come by, and they are even harder to interpret when they are available, but many perceive Google+ to be the geekier cousin to Facebook. Google+ adoption rates have been growing over time, but at one point (Dec 2011) largest group of users of Google+ tend to be males between 25 to 34.

But perhaps the bigger barrier than building discrete circles within Google+ is simply the daunting task of recreating your Facebook friend list on yet another social media tool. This is, to me, one of the greatest barriers to adoption for Google+. People invested heavily in their Facebook networks. And many of those people don’t want to do it again. So, until people have a compelling reason to rebuild their social neighbourhoods, Google+ and others like it will play second fiddle.

Regardless, Google+ is a force to recon with. Its growth is accelerating: Today Google+ is the fastest-growing network thingy ever.. And Google+ is only going to become more dominant as it continues to integrate itself into all of Google’s services (think Search, Gmail and YouTube: There’s No Avoiding Google+.

Feel free to look me up on Google+ and add me to your circles!

Todd

This is part 4 of my blog series entitled Set Up Your Tools.

Facebook is a monster in the audience development space. Facebook has grown into the biggest, most influential, highest traffic site on the Internet. Its reach is astounding, as it is the current reigning social networking site. I attribute this to a couple of things:

• Being in the right place at the right time – there was no other established social media site that came close in terms of knitting together all of our relationships.
• The price is right – classmates.com should have owned this space, but they charged for access and people weren’t that nosey about what happened to their old classmates.

Facebook hit the market at a time when MySpace was big. MySpace was the original glamour site for people to post everything about their interests and it faltered with the launch of Facebook, LinkedIn and the gang.

Facebook has emerged as the king of the hill. Alexa ranks Facebook as the top site on the Internet: Alexa Topsites

‘Nuff said.

So… what does this mean? How should I use Facebook?

Well… for starters, you need to have a presence. There are a few ways to have a presence on Facebook:

A Facebook account

This is your main presence on Facebook. You enter some information about yourself (name, age, location, school(s) attended, etc.). You can upload photos and you can share pretty much anything you wish to share with your friends: status updates, big events, jokes and more! I am particularly fond of VagueBookers. Note: don’t be a VagueBooker!

Facebook pages

According to Facebook, Your page is your business or organization’s home on Facebook. This is a spot where you can create an awareness of a brand. People can interact with your brand through this page. You can build an audience by sharing content including stories, photos, upcoming events, etc.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups provide a closed space for small groups to communicate about shared interests. Facebook Groups differ from Facebook Pages primarily in that groups typically have a small privacy-controlled audience whereas pages are generally open to anyone.

And, Facebook is constantly changing. So, not only do you need to build a presence, but you must also adjust it over time as Facebook changes.

Not only do you need to build a presence within Facebook, but it is also a good idea to integrate with Facebook. Embedding likes or comments on your blog or website helps keep your web presence relevant within Facebook.

Facebook also does a great job offering cross-platform support. Facebook is everywhere that it matters to be:

• iOS
• Android
• Web

This isn’t unique to Facebook, as Twitter, Google+ and the gang all have a cross-platform presence as well. What that means is that you must have a presence across a myriad of platforms. You must have presence on the web and on the leading mobile platforms as well. More and more traffic is migrating to mobile devices, with some organizations seeing more of their traffic coming from mobile devices than from traditional desktop browsers.

And, just yesterday, Facebook announced their latest Facebook feature, Facebook Graph Search. Graph Search will allow people to harvest information from your social network. You could search for “favourite movies amongst your male friends aged 25 to 34”, for example. There is a lot of potential here, but, the biggest problem will be the quality of the search results. I don’t know about you, but my Facebook profile is far from complete or accurate. I think that I last updated my profile over a year ago. And, I think that makes me a keener. And, my posts are typically a collection of random items that I’ve found interesting online. Others are similarly skeptical as well: Jesse Brown in Macleans, “Why Facebook’s ‘Graph Search’ is not enough to woo this investor”, and others – just google Facebook Graph Search for more (wait… you mean a good search engine already exists? Who knew!)

Note: Facebook Graph Search is currently available only to a small number of users, but is expected to be rolled out to everyone shortly.

Bottom line: you need to build and understand your presence on Facebook. One of the costs of living online is that you have to be where the people are. And pretty much everyone is on Facebook. So make sure you build a presence within Facebook and then interact with your Facebook profile, page(s) and/or groups on a regular basis to help grow your online community.

Todd