Plus is all the Buzz in Social Media

Google Plus is the biggest buzz of social media news right now. Everybody is talking about G+. Headlines everywhere read things like, Google+ Poised To Become Number Two Network In 12 Months According To Survey, Google Plus Is Growing Like A Weed, Google+ is here to stay and Facebook is Toast.

Launched just over a month ago, with its monumental surge to 25 million unique global visitors, Google+ has become the fastest growing social networking service, easily outpacing both Twitter and Facebook.

But then Google doesn’t have a very good track record with social media. After all, does anybody even remember Google’s last ventures into social media, like Orkut, Wave or Buzz?

At this point, why would anyone consider switching to Plus? Everybody’s friends are all on Facebook. Everybody already has their following on Twitter. Everybody’s business associates are connected with them on LinkedIn. Why would anybody want to learn to use yet another social network?

Whether you like it or not, if you have any kind of business associated with the Internet, chances are you’ll be Google+’ing within a year. You just don’t have much choice in the matter.

The first and foremost reason Google has the upper hand in the social media market, is because Google Owns Search. Google is the undisputed king of finding information on the web and handles about 85% of Internet users’ default searches.

Accordingly, Google is not as concerned about keeping people on their Plus network. Heck, they still have you on all their other networks! Google is the basis for reaching most people on the Internet. It doesn’t need you to “like” a page (like Facebook) or “tweet” a link (like Twitter) to know what you like and don’t like to effectively target better advertisements, because Google sees your search and browsing history, thus making it far more intelligent about your behavior and interests than any other social network.

This is what makes marketing tools like Google Offers and AdSense more relevant. Because Google can advertise directly targeted at what you like.

But that’s not all, considering Google also owns Google News, a major news aggregator, Gmail, a dominant email provider, YouTube, the biggest video channel online, Blogger, a major blogging service, Google Maps mapping tools, as well as a voice-chat infrastructure, photo albums, scheduling tools and ability to build personal websites. And Google is integrating it all together into one great big superservice. No other social media site can even begin to provide customers what Google can offer.

If you’re a diehard Foursquare user, you can now use Google Maps to simply funnel those same location based updates to Plus. If you like to review restaurants on Yelp, you can now use Google Places to post reviews to Plus so your friends can see what you thought of the crab cakes. If you use Skype and are happy to see it coming to Facebook, now you can make free calls around the U.S. with Gchat on Plus. And though Facebook is offering @Facebook email domain, you would be better off saving yourself the trouble and just stay with the biggest email provider in the world, Gmail.

To make a long story short, Google already has hundreds of millions of loyal users. Asking people to try Plus is not the same as someone asking them to use an unheard-of social network for the first time. Plus was able to acquire 25 million users in the first few weeks of launching because so many Internet users were already using their services, like Chrome, Gmail, YouTube and Reader especially. The company will continue integrating their services to keep Plus in the spotlight.

Steve Kille, a former Senior Research Fellow at University College London, a Blogger for Ferris Research, a leading e-mail and Internet communications research firm, and one of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)’s authors writes, “Google+ is very impressive. I reckon Facebook is toast.”

Kille believes that Google+ will eventually killi off Facebook for most of the same reason I described above, including Google Plus‘ “integration with other Google services [which] will be a key strategic advantage, that Facebook will not be able to match.”

Though for the moment, the majority of G+ users are Internet related geeks and marketers, I assure you it will go mainstream and possibly put Twitter, MySpace and eventually Facebook out of business. Google is set at becoming the Wal-Mart of the Internet. They want to provide everything to everybody. And considering that like Wal-Mart, they can outbid, outperform and outlast any competitor, it is only logical to assume that like Wal-Mart, they will become the closest thing possible to a monopoly without breaking anti-trust laws.

In other words, you will more than likely be using several Google services in the future, with one of those probably being Google Plus.

In recent polls conducted by The Christian Post, more than 40 percent of 10,000 people stated that they believe Google+ would dethrone Facebook as the biggest social network while the other 40 percent believed that Google+ and Facebook would co-exist.

I'm no social media guru. I'm no techie. But I have been closely following social media for several years. I know social media. And mark my words, Google Plus will do some serious damage to both Facebook and Twitter within the next two years.

But this is not all bad. I like Google. I like Gmail, I like YouTube, I like Reader and I like Chrome. But I love Plus!

Love it or hate it, Google Plus will soon become the new undisputed King of Social Media.

Get used to it. Use it!

Written By: Tom Retterbush