Bradley Horowitz recently announced that Google plans to split the Google+ platform into two separate services: Photos and Streams. In addition, Google+ is introducing Collections. With these changes, the marketing community is speculating what it can mean.
There have been many articles published recently that say the change to Photos and Streams is a signal that Google+ is going away for good. However, Google+ at the same time is adding Collections, which allows users to group their posts by topic. If Google+ was truly “dying,” we don’t think they would be adding another feature to it.
Analyzing the Google+ Changes
Google’s plans to create a social network to rival Facebook was definitely ambitious and may be seen as a failure, as it only has about 300 million active users (about a billion fewer than Facebook). It also doesn’t have any really unique features that Facebook doesn’t already have. The only exception is the SEO value that your blog posts could gain by being posted on Google+, which is one of the main reasons that businesses joined in the first place.
But the interesting thing about Google is that they are not afraid to take risks. And they are constantly innovating and trying new things—leading to the changes to Photos, Streams and Collections. Here’s some more insight to these features.
Photos and Streams
While Google has been vague about what exactly the new Photos and Streams will entail, we know that Bradley Horowitz will be in charge of these new products.
In his Google+ post, Horowitz said, “It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.
Google+ Photos has had some success as a photo storage and sharing platform as it also automatically backs up your photos on Google Drive. It can also organize photos in clever “highlights” sections and let people search them based on their appearance. How Google plans to use the Stream still remains a mystery to most.
Collections
Collections is essentially Google’s version of Pinterest. Users can create collections that are focused on a specific topic. Then your Google+ followers can choose to follow specific collections on a topic they are interested in. You can also choose the privacy of each collection so it can be visible to the public, only to your circles, or only to you. The main difference between Collections and Pinterest is that you can post anything from pictures to videos to just text updates on Google—it can truly be a collection of any kind of content related to that topic.
Google+ explained that its “happiest Google+ users are those who connect with others around shared interests and passions.” So Collections was their answer to users so they can have a place to share these interests.
What It Means for Marketers
While we don’t believe that Google+ is going away, these changes can definitely impact how the social network affects your profile. Therefore, the first lesson to marketers is to not put all of your eggs in one basket. Just like you should diversify your investments, the same should be said for your social media platforms. Don’t rely on only one platform for your social media marketing efforts. While many firms don’t use Google+ exclusively, there are quite a few that use only Facebook, only Twitter or only LinkedIn. But what would you do if one of those networks ended tomorrow? It’s important to be active on several different networks for this very reason.
The next lesson for marketers is to create content that can work on a variety of platforms. For example, blog posts that are educational are very universal and can be posted on almost any platform. However, photos from your latest company picnic are really only suitable for Facebook. So it’s critical that you create a variety of content, and that you own it. This also means you need to be sure your website is set up to be the hub of all of your content, such as blog posts, white papers, videos, etc. This ensures you always have your content in a place that’s safe and can’t disappear with a social network.
Google is constantly changing and adapting its different products to create the best experience for its users. And they have many successful platforms such as Search, YouTube, Gmail and Hangouts. We will continue to monitor Photos, Streams and Collections to see how they evolve and how it changes Google+ along the way.