A little over a month ago I wrote 5 Reasons Why I Might Dump Facebook for Google+ and it sparked some pretty good discussion about social media.
In fact, that post received over 80 comments, which is something that hasn’t happened around here for some time.
Not only did that prove to me that folks had quite a bit to say about Google+, it also showed me that my blog (though I still feel at times it is), well isn’t quite dead yet.
So What’s Your Verdict on Google Plus?
Now that Google+ has been available to users for a few weeks, I wanted to check in and see if you’re still using it. Like all shiny, new toys, Google+ was incredibly addicting – so much that I spent a few hours a day on it at the beginning.
So what about you? Has the luster worn off for you already?
I have to admit for me, personally, that it has to some degree. I still think that I enjoy the interface and overall my experience much more on Google+ than on Facebook. After all, it’s fun posting a picture of a new house and getting 33 +1′s and 44 comments.
But that was in the honeymoon stages of Google+, and I doubt that it would receive as much attention today as it did back then.
The Sad Truth About Social Media
If you’re anything like me, I’ll be willing to bet that you’re desperately waiting for that magic “sharing” platform to be developed. You know, the one that allows you to post something once, and it magically sends it out as a Facebook status, shows up in your Google+ stream and also sends it out as a Tweet?
I’ll admit that I feel pretty lame about having something witty to say, posting it on one of the 3 aforementioned social media platforms and then copy and pasting it into the others.
And what if I want to share some delicious Starbucks pics on Instagram?
The Undeniable Truth About Social Media
Social media and photo sharing really aren’t going anywhere – at least the last time I checked. What that ultimately means is that at some point, we’ll need to choose our battles and spend our time wisely.
In the end, it’s really important for us to focus on why we’re social. And why we share.
Is it personal? Is it to draw traffic to our blog or website? Or is it ultimately to expand our brand and following so that we can marketing our businesses to folks?
Either way, there’s some truth to social media strategy – something that I plan to explain and talk about soon here on my blog.
Until then, let’s discuss our verdicts on Google Plus…
I like to call this WordPress.
Maybe if I stopped developing stuff I’d have time to try the WordPress app. Perhaps I’ll have to amend the post.
I love the sharing aspect of WordPress, but I’m still finding my way around Google+
I agree. I use WordPress along with some plugins (which I admittedly wrote) for this. When I make a post, it shares to Facebook, Twitter, sends email to subscribers, shows up in RSS feeds… Still working on a way to share to Google+ currently, but a Simple Google Connect plugin is not far from being developed.
Hey Otto – first off, it was great to meet you at WCSF this weekend…
Second, assuming you are posting “statuses” and “photos” like one would normally do on Twitter or Facebook, do you exclude any of those types of categories from your RSS feed? I know you said “shows up in RSS feeds”, but I would think if you are making multiple updates a day, that might get overwhelming for an RSS reader.
Perhaps the best way for me to consider doing this is to create a category called Statuses, and simply exclude that from the feed.
I don’t exclude anything, but at the same time, I post like once or twice a week, tops. So I might not be the best person to ask about that specific sort of thing. Category feeds may be a good way to deal with that, or if you have specific cases, custom post types might work better. Depends on the details.
I went the other way and STOPPED auto-sharing. I do it all manually right now, because nothing did it … right. Instead of a million plugins, I post it where I am, and the more feedback I get, personally, the more likely I am to keep posting there. Where ever there is.
That is outstanding advice. I supposed the only time I really try to make an effort to share across all of them is when I use Instagram. Which, by the way, would be really cool if they added Google Plus as an option to share to.
I both agree and disagree with this advice. I do have plugins enabled (which I wrote) that push my new posted content into various social networking systems like Facebook and Twitter. However, the difference is that I try to keep things separated from myself and allow my readers to choose what exactly it is that they want to follow, and how they want to follow it.
For example, I have two blogs. My personal stuff is at http://ottodestruct.com and my WordPress stuff is at http://ottopress.com. Totally separate (even though they’re actually not, being multisite and all). But they have separate pages on Facebook. Posts from each get auto-pushed to the appropriate FB page, The OttoPress stuff only goes to the http://www.facebook.com/ottopress page, while the personal stuff goes both to its page and to my own FB Profile. Both of them also get aggregated into the @ottodestruct Twitter account for simplicity reasons, but my own personal Twitter account is @Otto42, allowing my readers to only follow my blogs or to follow me personally, or both. I separate everything out, basically, in order to allow choice.
This works pretty well, overall. It allows people who are non-technical or unfamilar with RSS to follow my ramblings on their platform of choice. Some people prefer to see my posts in their Facebook, some prefer Twitter, and some use RSS. This is entirely opt-in, and other than having buttons on my sidebar, I don’t really promote it that much. But it still gives people options to follow me in their preferred manner, if they care (and honestly, I’m constantly amazed that anybody does.. seriously, when are people doing to notice that I’m BS’ing my way through this?!?
).
Just wanted to say, Otto, that is some great marketing right there. You managed to get in two websites, facebook page and a twitter mention all into one comment. That’s how to do it, sir!
Its slowly turning into Wave 2.0
Slowly might be the word… but I still see a lot of folks quite active on it. Wave pretty much died when it started, but I see Google making sure this doesn’t happen again.
Google plus is great because of it’s simplicity and clean interface, but one of my main problems if anything is most of my friends who aren’t exactly on the techie side are all a little inept for lack of a better word, on using G+. I’ve sent them invites and all, most of them ask me what it is, or why they should join it, or just tell me to go back to Facebook. I guess it all comes down to the type of users you are inviting, I’ve made about 3 out of 10 people I’ve invited to come over to the G+ side, but the rest find no value in it just yet. The 3 just so happens to be all with some type of IT background. Other then that, G+ has been pretty dead to me.
I (somewhat) get the whole invite thing, and I agree that’s kinda hard to figure out. In all reality, Google should just open it up to the public and let people sign up. While I understand them trying to build hoopla, they are trying to directly compete with Facebook. That being said, it makes sense to me NOT to have any resistance in getting people onboard.
Yes, this happened to me too, only 3 responded…..
Failure. Because we can’t use it. We being free or paid Google App users. We being the users who would use and tell our non tech friends whether to use it or not.
Hm, why can’t you use it? Are you not able to get an invite? I don’t pay for it… I used my Gmail account.
In order to get a g+ account, you have to have a google profile. Google profiles are not yet available to those of us who use Google Apps.
Gotcha. Kinda weird, but understandable I guess.
My guess is, CB refers to Google Apps users, those of us who chose Google to handle all our emails, documents, calendars from our own domain name instead of @gmail.
Google Apps is a free service, but you can get extra features for a few dollars per year.
I never understood this. One might think that the most hardcore fans and paying consumers, those of us who trust enough the brand to handle our own domain name emails, would be the first to test and use new products. At Google, it is the opposite: Google Apps users can’t sign up to Google+ yet.
I ended up using a Gmail account to sign in, but that means I have to switch account every time I want to use Google+. It is a pain, really…
I agree that their are too many options vying for our attention, and it’s impossible to post everything you want on five different social networks. Eventually I’ll need to cut back and focus on a few. Right now that would look like this: Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’ll see if Facebook makes its way back into the club.
The difficult thing for me is that I personally like Google+, but so many of my friends and business folks still hang out on Facebook.
I love the concept but Google hasn’t incorporated Google+ or Google Profiles into Google Apps accounts. You can’t create a Google Profile or use Google+ from your Google Apps domain. So to use Google+, you have to either log-out of Google Apps/Gmail or keep an incognito window open logged in separately. Makes perfect Google sense – right?!?!
Hm, I didn’t know that. I signed up for it when I got an invite and it’s all connected through my Gmail account.
Maybe the reason Google hasn’t rolled out G+ on Google Apps is it still primarily being in it’s beta stages, they want to roll it out to the public, once most of the bugs and issues are out of the way, they’ll roll it over to their business customers.
On another note, HootSuite sounds like it would save me a lot of time flipping back and forth, do they allow multiple accounts under one primary hootsuite account? E.G. Managing personal accounts + business accounts?
It can. I use it for 3 profiles. My personal profile and those for 2 companies (about a dozen social networks in all). The catch is for more than 5 social networks it costs $5.99/month.
I wish I could use Google plus but all of my GMail accounts (including my personal accounts) are in Google Apps. Google has done a great job leaving out their business customers on this one.
As for your “Magic sharing platform,” have you tried Hootsuit? I find it to be very effective at managing all the accounts I need.
Does Hootsuite post to Facebook? I’m currently using Tweetdeck to manage my Tweets, and simply love it.
As for the Gmail/Apps thing – doesn’t really make sense to me why they would do this, considering there are a LOT of business people out there…
Yep, it’ll even post to your Facebook pages., LinkedIn, Foursquare and others. The catch is you can only have 5 accounts on the free version. I use it with TweetDeck in Chrome and while Tweetdeck’s streaming and notifications are handy it simply isn’t as powerful as Hootsuite, especially in filtering out the noise.
I think G+ will pickup steam once Google releases the API’s. I do think it’s better than Facebook. Twitter? Maybe not so much for right now.
Only time will tell if they really go after Twitter… and even if they do, they won’t be the only ones who are doing it.
I’m curious, is there a ‘public’ stream in Google+? It seems as though I can only see posts from my contacts.
I not to good with either wordpress or Google for much to say.. I like having more of the control of the #thingy (website). But Your article was great I have even boosted it to all my network cause we all have different opinions and well no one is right in this battle or any Battle for that matter..
I agree the interface is lovely but I’m still pretty slow to warm up to it. I treat the +1 pretty much like a “like” button but overall I still visit my Facebook feed more often. And I visit my Twitter feed more than both of those. Honestly, I’m just tired of having to learn another social networking tool and would rather time was spent on improving the ones we already use.
Do you think your feelings would change if most of your network was using Google Plus?
As for promoting, I find it a harder than Twitter because you have a wall of sorts.
Maybe it’s because your own information dosen’t flow fast enough. Or if you were to make 3 or 4 posts with the same link, it looks repetitive. I like to promote my new articles at least 3 times a day – morning afternoon, and night on Twitter.
I also wrote a couple posts about the other things I don’t like about Google+
I’m hooked on G+ because I’ve been using Picasa Web Albums for years (276 albums since 2006, ~40K pictures). Before, I had to share directly with email addresses of those in the albums (which was tedious). Now, it’s a simple share with a circle and any future members I tag in those communities.
Google+ is a game changer for me.
Adam, you sound like me – I pretty much use (and prefer) Google for all of my online things, so it naturally makes sense to feel the same about Plus. What I really like about it, as small as it may seem, is the ability to see notifications from Plus while in my Gmail account.
So true — the toolbar notifications are awesome. And I wasn’t convinced of the PicasaWebAlbums benefit over Flickr and others until G+ became my privacy tool. As nice as Flickr’s “web 2.0″ AJAX batch editor is, it’s nothing compared to the clean and crisp UI Google has built across its ecosystem.
That being said, I’ve also switched from embedding images from Picasa on my blog because – ala CopyBlogger post recently – privacy settings made me digital sharecropper.
Thanks for the awesomeness of GenesisWP and all you (and the rest at StudioPress) do.
I’m still “hooked” on G+. I love the interface and all the options and I love the way that it integrates with the rest of my Google account. Now that some plugins are starting to be developed for WordPress, I’m liking it even more. To be honest, I never really liked Facebook but at the time, it was really the only thing out there. I never cared for the FB interface and for the privacy concerns, well, they’re well documented so I really don’t need to get into that. Yes, some of the luster has worn off but that’s to be expected. So, for me, I’m sticking with it and using FB less. I’m not sure if I’ll ever close out my FB account because I have lots of contacts (both consulting and friends) there but I’m sure that I’ll be using it (FB) much less.
A lot of people have been talking about G+. I’m getting really frustrated because when I go to Google+ it still says
“Google+ is in limited Field Trial Right now, we’re testing with a small number of people, but it won’t be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone. Leave us your email address and we’ll make sure you’re the first to know when we’re ready to invite more people.
Keep Me Posted (email subscribe link)
Already invited? We’ve temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon.”
Any idea when it will be available to the rest of the world?
I like Google+. The ability to sort out the circles so I can see what my favorite authors are saying is great. I can sort out my favorite tech update people to read. I can do that on other things too, but its nice that the authors are not limited to 140 characters. Forced brevity can be a pain sometimes.
Sharing with RL friends things that I might not post on FB is also nice.
I love Google+, but I think they made a mistake in doing invite only. People are far too comfortable with facebook (after most already made a switch from myspace) to learn a new platform that isn’t even available to everyone. Not to mention Facebook accepted the challenge and has stepped up their game tremendously. I wish it would take over, but I don’t even use it. Everyone I talk to is still on facebook and I have my business page established there as well. When they do finally come out of their trial period it’ll have to be with a bang and a whole lot of user friendly features.
I completely agree – I get that they want to create Buzz, but not at the expense of people getting frustrated and not being able to participate.
At first I didn’t know how to use Google +. I didn’t want to write the same thing I wrote as my FB status there, and since you can’t get a personalized URL, I couldn’t remember my site’s URL to paste it around my social network (and Im too lazy to copy/paste it
). But last night, I figured what to do with it.
“I’m gonna post photos in Google +” is what came to mind. So far, I don’t know if there is a limit to the amount of photos you can post (different to Flickr’s 200-limit on free accounts), so Google + seems like a good idea to me.
There are things I still dont get: why is Buzz still around? And why does the +1 button have a section of its own, instead of putting anything you +1′d as a G+ post?
I had google + on my sites but i did not like it. I think facebook is a lot better and people already have a facebook account. I dont think it will be bringing anything new and the biggest problem is that people have to get a google account to vote.
I think Google + has dwindled in popularity for me. While I like the idea of Google+, like you, I am sitting back waiting for a magic button that lets us post to everywhere at the same time.
I completely agree – it was pretty much the shiny new toy for me that I had to play with, and now it’s more something I feel I have to do. Though I do like it more than Facebook, I’m planning on writing a follow up blog post about this.
I really like g+ and it is nice to see that they have upped themselves on the design side, compared to earlier google tools. But the big problem for google is how much people have invested in facebook. All the pictures, friends, posts, likes, …. Just getting a friend is at a higher cost than and add to a circle. g+ really has it’s job cut out for them, but I think they will survive by time. Facebook is getting more closed(scared of loosing users) and as technology develops this combination is always a sure death warrant.
I think Google+ is very refreshing compared to the facebook experience. Facebook has turned into the “Myspace” of 2011 in my opinion. The only reason I still use it is because it might be the most powerful marketing tool known to man. If I could get 700 million people to join Google+(working on it), I would shut down facebook operations TODAY!!
G+ is still fresh to me, as I received my invite only a month ago, but I think the potential is phenominal. I agree with Christian D.H. when he says that ” g+ really has it’s job cut out for them”, but I think with Google’s unlimited resources, they are up to the challenge. After all, Google is taking over the world…just a matter of time.
Mike Rich
Tried Diaspora yet? It’s in Alpha. It’s Open Source, decentralized, privacy aware and it’s Google+ borrowed “Aspects”. Best of all. NO ADS.