Which Company Will be King of the Social Media World?
Google is attempting to make its mark in the social media world with its launch of Google+. Should Facebook be worried that it may disappear into the night the way MySpace slowly burned out? Can Google be a legit contender in taking on Facebook?
According to ComScore Data Mine, Google surpassed 1 billion unique visitors worldwide in May, while Facebook rang in at 713.6 million.
To further this numbers game, the NielsonWire Company reported that Google’s lead is narrower in the U.S., where it had 155 million unique visitors from desktop and laptop computers in May compared with Facebook’s 140 million.
Which One Will Reign As King of Social Media?
Business and Friend Use
At the time this blog was written, Google+ does not allow entities that aren’t people, i.e. businesses and organizations. It’s only accepting applications for “entities” to participate in a “small experiment to see the effects of brands in the G+ experience”.
However, Facebook allows both business pages and business and organization groups.
Google+’s Facebook Friend Exporter: Export your friends’ contact info from Facebook so you can import them into Google+, is now blocked by Facebook! Unless you know your friend’s e-mail address, you can’t invite them. You can’t “search” for people the way you can on Facebook.
What Now?
Currently, Google may be leading with the of number of users, but Facebook has an enormous base of regular users who spend a large amount of time on its site much more than Google.
There are still questions that need to be answered. Will people will be attracted to the appeal of the new Google+ service? Will they be willing to leave an established network like Facebook where they already have numerous connections? Will they want two social media profiles?
Who wins? The companies, or us, the every day computer user?
The people who use social media sites will benefit from two strong companies battling to improve their products and services to either keep up with technology and social media, or win over the market.
Only time will tell how far this social media site feud will go. In the mean time, we’ll all continue to “like”, share and soon “+1”.
*UPDATE:
Impressive Improvements Coming to Google+
Major Google+ changes and improvements coming next week:
The following list was extracted from comments on Vic Gundotra’s Google+ profile, Senior VP of Social at Google. The speed at which this release has been announced is impressive.
- Ability to share Google Docs and Calendar with circles
- Lifting of the 5000 circle cap and the ability to overlap circles
- Easy private messaging option including to person who starts a thread
- Link to hide all comments again after you’ve clicked to show all
- Ability to modify circles a post is shared with after posting it
- Ability to share with all circles, but with an “except” option
- Reading sparks and +1 comments in the Android app
- Option of a circle that doesn’t show up in your stream
- Menu follows you down the stream as you scroll
- Revamp Google Reader to make sharing easier
- Sharing and refresh updates in the Android app
- Better integration of Google Chat with Google+
- Fix issues with instant upload for photos
- Addition of hash tags to aid searching
- Blocking working 100% of the time
- Google+ app for other platforms
- Easy way to merge circles
- File-sharing integration
- Nested comments
