Why Google+ Is Worth Your While
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According to many people, Google+ is the next big thing in the social networking world, and will wipe Facebook out of existence just as Facebook did with Myspace. Whether this is true or not, there will be thousands of people jumping on the bandwagon now that Google+ has gone public, creating the perfect social networking opportunity for those of us who are looking to generate clients using this avenue. In this article, we’ll tell you why it’s a good idea to jump on this bandwagon and how to best use it to your advantage.
First of all, Google+ is largely like Facebook, and can be used in almost the exact same way. However, it does have a few innovative new ideas that make social networking easier to handle. Some features include circles, some sweet formatting commands, video chatting, news, custom viewing based on geographic area, and a few more fun things.
The use of circles is the biggest difference from Facebook, although the latter has recently incorporated a similar feature in their newest version. The difference is the ease of use in Google+ and the flexibility it gives you when posting. When you open an account on Google+, you’ll have four circles to start with. You can re-name, add extra circles, and you can organize these circles as you choose. When you make a post, you can share it to all of your circles, one circle in particular, a specific group of people, or one specific person.This comes in handy for a business who needs to organize people based on relationship or audience, and streamlines posting so that the account owner can target a specific audience when posting.
As for the individual post, there are some fun new formatting commands that Google+ has included that allow the user to send a clear message. For example, the wrap_around a phrase — it sets the text in italics — * for bold, and _* for bold italic text. To tag people in posts, add @ or + and the person’s name to the post. Additionally, you can mute comments on a particularly popular post, so that you don’t receive a thousand notifications that people have +1 (the Google+ equivalent of “like”) or commented on your post.
By far, the coolest and fanciest feature of Google+ is the Hangout feature. With this fun application, you can create a video chat session in which multiple people can participate. Google+ also offers a conventional chat application that works the same as the Facebook chat feature.
Another cool feature is the ability to customize a news page based on your interests, feed viewing options that allow you to only see posts from certain circles or people in your geographic area, and options for alert delivery. However, we couldn’t find a way to create an event that people can be invited to, RSVP, and provide comments. Google+ didn’t seem to have this incredibly useful feature, but we are sure they have something up their sleeve.
Overall, as stated before, Google+ is a lot like Facebook, with a few more bells and whistles. We wouldn’t recommend you dump your Facebook account yet, but the sooner you jump on the Google+ bandwagon, the better you’ll be at managing it when it really picks up. For now it feels a bit like a big empty room, but we expect Google+ will become a full house within the next year.