What is Google +1? Social Media Innovation or Fad?
Posted by Aleesha Tully on Fri, Apr 01, 2011
If you haven’t heard about it already, Google recently launched their latest foray into the social media world, or at least tried to expand their social networking presence beyond their reputation for search, with another incarnation of the familiar “sharing” button, which you will commonly know at the “like” or the “Digg".
Concept
The concept follows in a very similar fashion to the leading social media concept, the “like” button on Facebook which allows you to acknowledge your good opinion websites, posts, photos, and other media. Google have now placed a “+1” button next to individual search entries, which users can click in order to recommend a specific result to their Google contacts.
3 Benefits For Google
This concept, if successful, will work for Google three-fold. Firstly, it could establish Google in a better social sharing role, and make them a go-to facility for promotion and marketing of brands and products, if the concept proves popular. In this way, it could become a strong competitor for Facebook in Social Sharing.
Secondly, Google can use this facility as another way to grade its search results. Even if you’ve employed the best SEO, there are a multitude of bad eggs out there who can get around Google’s page grader algorithms to fool the results. The decision to launch the Google +1 facility will allow people to make bogus or bona fide search results known so that people, and Google, can see what is a genuine result.
This too could work for personal social marketing strategies, as long as users become more prone to logging into their google accounts. It could be that in one years time we will all be into giving a "+1" as well as "liking" our own content to help increase our brand reach.
Thirdly, users can only use the “+1” facility if they are logged in to a Google account, and have upgraded their account. Users will have to be logged in both to recommend results and see what results their contacts have recommended. This will encourage new users to come online to the Google way of life.
The Future Of Social Sharing?
It is likely that this is only the first of many advances into the social sharing world that Google will take this year, and we can’t wait to see how successful this will be, and what their next steps will be. It is truly an interesting time to be in social media.
Want to know more about using social media for your business? Check out the recording of our recent seminar, "Whats new in Social Media for 2011".