What will make Google+ Competition for Facebook

I Know what you are thinking, I hear you now. You say, “Tim you have written about how Google+ missed their mark, started too soon, and is just ok.” Yes I did say all that, and more if you know me. BUT, and I say this will all caps, as marketers, we better get ready to hit the ground running with Google+ for our clients.

What Google+ Can do to Make pages for Brands Better

  • Google Analytics will be the “insights” – let us put our Google Analytics in the pages. Depending on your knowledge of Google Analytics you can track what people do and if they go to your site.  However, Google will need to put in engagement results in Google Analytics, such as +1 (aka Likes), impressions, shares, comments and the like.
  • Integration directly with YouTube – I think this will be a great advantage. Right now there is the debate, should I put the video in YouTube and Facebook? Now, once it is in YouTube it can be instantly carried over to the page.
  • Let Fans/consumers to self select into Brand circles – This will be something I think would really be cool. Let the brand set up circles, and then let the consumers select which one or ones they want to be in. This would allow pages to post more then once and actually target their messages depending on circle. A perfect example of this is if you have a sponsorship, ex if Coke created an American Idol circle to put out updates. We haven’t seen much  EASY, segregation of fan/followers, this could be the first.
  • The design is clean – One of the things I like best is that Google+ is clean. It’s not as cluttered as Facebook. I know that ads will be coming to + but I hope they keep it as clean with pages.

These are just a few things I think Google+ can do to really be a competitor to Facebook. Google has lost momentum on + but for once I don’t think it’s a total failure like Wave or Buzz. They can still turn it around and make something of it, but it will take some effort.

Tim is the founder of Element33. A social media agency specializing in education, management and strategy for small businesses. He comes from a traditional marketing agency but has embraced all things digital. He considers himself a marketing nerd and believes that all marketing is tied together. This means no matter what silo you are in, social, email, seach, etc, changes in one will affect the other!

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