Google+ seems to be all the rage these days, with wildly divergent views among social media practitioners and users with respect to the viability of the social network. Personally, I’m still on the fence with regards to the current value of Google+ to brands and marketers
I thought I’d share with you my high-level reflections on Facebook’s new product announcements and what they mean. Bottom line is, while the changes that Facebook announced at F8 created more ways to connect with consumers, reaching those consumers may be more difficult due to a higher ‘noise’ level and competition for user’s time and attention.
Today Facebook announced a very interesting new feature; the subscribe button. It’s designed to allow individuals to make their public updates available to other individuals, aka “subscribers” without requiring a reciprocal friend relationship.
If this sounds like Twitter, it’s because it’s very much like Twitter. I suspect Google+ will follow suit soon with a similar concept.
I think this is a great feature, and would be even greater if it was available to Pages.
However Facebook will probably not make this available to Pages for a simple reason: Facebook doesn’t want to give marketers a short-cut into their Fan’s Newsfeeds. That’s what ads are for.
Lets see if Google is more business friendly.
Sometimes it takes a lot less effort to validate assumptions about your product-market fit than one might think. You can come by customer feedback earlier and with less effort using Lean Startup methodologies.
Google Plus is hot right now, but neither Google nor its users have completely found out what to use the network for yet. Google+ may go down like a lead zeppelin (or Google Wave). Who knows. That said, here are my predictions on how Google+ may evolve in pursuit of market share.
It seems to me that mobile SMS, a.k.a. “texting” has had a profound impact on business communications etiquette. In particular, it has changed email, which increasingly seems to fall into the shorter-is-better category. While there’s a case to be made for the efficiency of short emails, there isn’t always one to be made for effectiveness, which I hope the following two examples will illustrate.
Facebook may be a great place to promote a handful of marquee products, but when you have hundreds of thousands of products, Facebook prospects may be better served back at the farm.
Judging by the growth in companies offering Facebook News Feed Optimization (NFO) services, it seems that an industry analogous to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) may be in development. The SEO industry has had its fair share of critics comparing many offerings to “snake-oil”. Will the same happen here? Can you really optimize messages for Facebook’s News Feed?