Facebook vs Google+, Personal vs Brand

I have taken a little bit of flak over my support of Google+ from various corners of the Caps office. Some people simply ask “do you really think it will last, havent they failed at social before?” Others just smirk or scoff or say “none of my friends are on it.” The Facebook juggernaut has been engrained in our psyches as being the the equivalent of social media and no other will ever trump it.

What strikes me most about these conversations is that we (I include myself in this since I made the same mistake) fail to look at Google+ for what it is, a brand tool. We are so used to looking at social media as a channel for individuals, a place where brands have had to cobble together an existence, force things to work, so to speak, that we fail to see the big picture. I might even say that Google missed the picture at first when they denied brands access to the service.

The more I have used Google+ the more I get it, I see it as a social tool for brands. it has the power of the monolithic search company behind it making it easier to find brand flavored pages, it has built in tools for small video conferences in the form of hangouts, they just released video updates, long-posting capabilities that can include images, ties directly into YouTube and the way circles work makes it easy to follow brands they way a user wants to.

Facebook has always been about connecting (or re-connecting) with individuals, brands worked their way in via fan pages and Facebook has accommodated brands to an extent. An economic environment has even sprung up around it with companies such as Involver and Wild Fire building platforms and languages to help brands take advantage of those accommodations. However, in the end Facebook remains about the individual. That is their foundation and focus.

I certainly dont think one service is better than the other but rather two distinct market segments. Think about it like the trash truck and the recycling truck. Both pick up discarded material but go in different directions. And that is how I see these two giants, the cliched “two-sides of the same coin.” Right now Facebook may have the upper hand in terms of sheer social dominance. I have been told that Google+ already has more brands using their service than Facebook. As more and more brands jump on Google+, Google will in turn do what Facebook did and make changes to benefit those brands. I have noted to colleagues around the office that somewhere around one in ten people are using Facebook but ten out of ten are using Google in one way, shape or form. It is only a matter of time until Google leverages that usage to push more people and brands on to Google+. We have already seen steps towards that as Google has integrated Google+ into search results.

Google doesn’t need to compete with Facebook for social dominance they just need to co-exist in the same space with a slightly different clientele in order to a a viable social service.