So – you’re a professional social media person. You are overwhelmed at the daily changes in the social media platform space. (Don’t worry – we all are.) I’ll guide you through a few suggestions for making it easier.
Google+ is the newest player in the mix. If you haven’t dipped your toes into the water, I’d strongly urge you to do so now. It is definitely the fastest growing platform. As of this writing (late September 2011), social media pros are the main users. And we love it. Ease of use, integration into the Google Borg and the beautiful interface far outweigh the many complaints new users have.
Google+ will continue to grow. The earlier you start using the tool, the more ready you will be to integrate it into your social media mix when it goes live for businesses. (I know, many businesses are already using it, but the complete set of business tools is not yet available. When it is, businesses will go into frantic integration mode.)
Twitter and Facebook are still where most non-social-media-pro people hang out. I’d suggest you simply look where your potential customers are hanging out and focus your efforts in that direction.
Zillions of posts on the recent changes to Facebook have been published, so I won’t go there. Also, Facebook annoyingly changes their platform hourly – so whatever I would publish would be out of date in about three minutes.
In short – please start using Google+. Here’s where you’ll find me.
I think in the coming months the playing field for social media will move away from features and more towards privacy. After messing around with the upcoming facebook timeline layout, a LOT of information is exposed.
Every single photo from my college days I had previously untagged were retagged and open for anyone to view on the timeline. As well as a lot of status updates which don’t make a lot of sense as they were from the days when updating your status on facebook was a totally different beast – the rules and mores of social media weren’t yet established, and I was just a kid in college!
Not to mention the new FB will be keeping track (and possibly posting) everything you do on any site that is enabled with facebook connect.
Maybe G+ is a stronger contender? Or maybe the rules are about to change again?
Wow, David – your story really highlights a direction that might drive people from Facebook to Google+. thanks for sharing that!