Goodbye Google+, we hardly knew…err...used thee.
Have you heard the news? Google+ is getting sent to that server farm in the sky. “Oh no! I use it every day to maintain social connections,” said no one. Boy, what a disappointment. I remember when Google+ was announced back in early 2011. Being a Google fanboy and lifelong technophile, I desperately wanted to get in on this exciting social network. Google was going to take Facebook’s concept of a social network but Google-fy it — make it work and clean up the interface. After asking around, a buddy sent me an early invite. I joined, set up my profile and than…nothing. There wasn’t any content, any interactions, any reason for me to check for updates. After a couple of years, my interest had completely atrophied. At the same time, my career took me deeper into web strategy and digital marketing and I quickly realized I couldn’t escape Google+!
Google+ everywhere. No. Really. It’s everywhere.
At some point, Google+ quit being a standalone social network. It was part of Google and engagement was low, so the natural thing to do was to integrate it into the whole spectrum of Google properties. Use YouTube casually? Not anymore — link your G+ account! Do you have a GMaps listing? Well, it’s now Google My Business and it’s tied to a G+ account. Gmail? G+. I think even at one point in time I had an Android phone that with all my settings locked up in a G+ account. It became inescapable. The integration with Google My Business was especially irritating because at the time I was trying to manage the digital presence of a college. We had a lot of buildings on campus and they were mislabeled on GMaps. How was I encouraged to fix this? By setting up a Google My Business for every single building, linking it to a corresponding G+ account and wait for verification codes to get sent to every building on campus. It was a disaster.
I’m sure colleges and universities weren’t the only groups that may have large campuses or a physical presence that shows up on GMaps but never fit cleanly into the “mom and pop corner store” model that was really forced upon the internet. Yes, there were lots of G+ accounts but they just weren’t used. It was a Potemkin social network — one where even Google’s CEO quit using it nearly three years ago.
A lot of digital marketers didn’t have that luxury. Since publishing on G+ gave a little extra SEO boost, digital marketers have had no choice but to remember to share their content on the social network. Was anyone reading it? Not anywhere I’ve worked, but working in SEO where success can often be defined as the sum of doing a lot of little things right, it would be irresponsible not to feed the social network with helpings of content that it so desperately hungered for. Will we have to keep posting on G+? God, I hope not.
Could it have been saved?
I don’t know. I think one of the best features of Google+ was its communities feature. I thought the interface was actually pretty ahead of its time. Perhaps it could have even competed with Reddit. It’s not that far-fetched really. Most content on the internet passes through Google in some shape or form and who could have aggregated and displayed useful content better than the top company in the world at organizing information. I guess that’s wishful thinking. It still feels like a lot of misinformation rises to the top of search results on popular topics. Any algorithmic attempt to populate G+ with content may have just ended up looking like…well…the rest of the internet.
For now, I suppose it’s simply a relief for digital marketers who have so many channels they have to feed. One less that offered so much frustration and so little value is certainly an improvement.
