No doubt many of you have seen the little Google +1 button (shown to your right in loving enlargement) on websites and blogs you have visited. Some of you understand it and some of you may think it’s one more distraction.
Two words with regard to your website: Get One.
It’s an important part of your long term plan for web development and web design.
In an age of Internet marketing/viral marketing becoming marketing on steroids, Google put in their two cents…which is worth WAY more than two measly cents to your business. The Google +1 button sits there next to the Facebook “like” button, Digg button, StumbleUpon button and whatever other social media sharing buttons are on a web page. All of those buttons are very valuable in getting your website viewed by a much wider audience and building your following online. The Google +1 button might just be the most valuable of all, as it can affect where you appear in the search engine results of people who click on it.
The way it works is when a visitor has a Google account and clicks on the +1, it will give them a little message that says “You publicly +1′d this as (their name here).” From that point forward, whenever they do a search for your kind of business you will rank higher in their search because they publicly +1′d your site. Basically, Google takes the fact that they gave your site (or a page on your site) a “thumbs up” in the Google platform and factors that into the algorithm of their personal search.
More and more, this kind of “personalized” searching is becoming the norm. It only figures that Google will work their own offerings (i.e. Google Places, Google Plus) into the algorithms and reward those of us who are smart enough to use them. Google is by far the largest search engine with 75% – 80% market share. Don’t take that lightly.
Get the button, and if you don’t know how your web development and web design team should be able to easily take care of it for you:)
In case you haven’t heard, Google has recently launched Google+, their social networking site that is trying to succeed where previous efforts have failed.
You remember…Google Buzz and Google Wave?
Yyyyyeah, they didn’t work out so well for Google. Truth is, Facebook has really become to social networks what Google is to search engines, which is a hard thing for even Google to compete with. To you and most business people trying to make the best use of their web development and web design efforts, the main question is what features does Google+ have that Facebook doesn’t?
More importantly, do those features really matter to you and your business enough for you to add yet another social media forum to your network?
Here are some of the new features that are getting some buzz:
Hangouts: Probably the biggest element Google+ has that Facebook doesn’t is a feature called “Hangouts” that gives users a way to join group video chats. It’s basically a chat room with video. Any user can create a Hangout and others can then join. As well as video chatting, users can also watch YouTube videos as a group.
Sparks: Sparks is the Google+ newsfeed, and it’s different from the Facebook news feed in that it’s focused on specific topics and on news: you won’t find information on where your friend was today or what they had for dinner, but you will find highlights from blogs, newspapers, and other media outlets sorted by topic.
What Strangers Are Saying: Whereas on Facebook the only posts and status updates that appear in your news feed come from people you’re friends with, Google+ lets you see posts and updates from people you aren’t yet following, but who are following you. You can follow them if you choose by putting them into one of your “circles”.
Chat with Strangers: Facebook Chat requires you to be friends with someone before you can chat with them. Google Hangouts, for better or for worse, are much more open: up to ten people can join a Hangout video chat, and they need not be in each others’ Circles to do so. Maybe nothing negative will come of this, but you’ve got to admit Google is taking a risk with a really loaded Pandora’s Box here.
So what’s the bottom line?
Bottom line is that yes…there is another social media forum to be considered for your Internet marketing and web development/web design efforts. Is it absolutely necessary? Functionally speaking, probably not, but the initial word is that you will do well to have a presence on Google Plus and the Google+ box (the equivalent of the Facebook “like” box) on your website will help you greatly in the search engines.
Today the majority of Tweets received were about Twitter becoming the Fastest Growing Search Engine. This piqued our interest so we took a look at the related post and did some “testing” for realistic searching. According to Socialnomics “Twitter Founder Biz Stone at Aspen Ideas Festival announced that Twitter now has over 800 million search queries per day … This roughly equates to 24 billion searches per month which is more than Bing (4.1) and Yahoo (9.4) combined.”
“Adding a search box to your website DOES NOT a search engine make.” - Andrew Mull, Master Internet Developer stated in discussion. You can see that Twitter has a tremendous amount of searches but what you really need to look at is what is being searched. Of course the founder, Biz Stone, would say that they (Twitter) are the next major search engine, it’s free publicity and people really eat it up. So can you blame them for making such a claim? Not really but unfortunately now people are under the impression that Twitter is some kind of search engine. Stone also goes on to say about Twitter, that it is “not a social network,” though many people view it as one. “That’s been a myth since the beginning,” he explained. “We’re much more like an information network or a source of news.” *source
Here is where we disagree. Twitter is a social tool, not a search engine. Any developer who has tried to create a well-oiled search engine knows that this is no easy task. When you look at all the intricacies of code and how search engines operate and then look at Twitter… it’s like comparing a single book to an entire library. The library being Google, it’s algorithms and code base.
There is no doubt that Twitter’s numbers are accurate. We are sure that Twitter gets a great amount of searches but we would surmise that most are looking for individual friends or celebrities …or trying to find specific Tweeters that are in the same industry. These users are NOT using Twitter for search in the traditional sense.
To test our hypothesis we went to Twitter and to Google and typed “Capital of Denmark” in their respective search boxes. All we really wanted to know was how fast and easily we could find “Copenhagen”. Surprise, surprise, Google performed better giving us the necessary information in the first link followed by MORE detailed information in other links. Twitter also gives us the information we’re looking for but further down in the “search results” and among other random postings that may mention any of the search terms. Twitter’s short comings are well known so there is no reason to reiterate the obvious. However, it must be known that Twitter lacks the structure and organization to function as a search engine or to realistically compete with Google and Yahoo! Twitter IS a social network simply for the fact that you use it to be social and NOT to search. When Twitter can search outside of itself (for example) instead of just referencing their own stored content, THEN we’ll talk “Search Engine”. Sorry, Biz, but we think you spoke too soon.
