Why Google+ is the Ultimate Social Networking Hybrid. - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

In the last ten years of the web, we’ve witnessed the rise of the unstoppable freight train that is Google. Extremely crafty and ingenious in the ways in which they innovate, we’ve seen them knock over the title of world’s largest search engine, pioneer web metrics, and occasionally have a dig at social networking; the latter of which has never been taken too seriously.

As a search engine, Google has always been perceived to be too impersonal and sterile to be able to successfully function as a hub for online social activity. Instead, we’ve seen the figureheads Facebook and Twitter set the standard for engaging social activity online. Google Wave, to its credit, was never intended to be a social networking platform but instead a community-driven tool of productivity. To be fair, the only direct attempt that Google has made at competing with Facebook was Google Buzz. I guess that you could say that it was a trial and error exercise for Google. They saw a hole in the market open up, and they lunged at it, without properly formulating something built entirely for the people, which ultimately, is the core factor in a social network becoming popular.

This is how Facebook achieved greatness. While Facebook did pioneer a lot of things, they did not invent the idea of the social network. The social network has been around since the days of ‘Yahoo! Geocities’. What gave Facebook their success, most notably over networking giants MySpace.com, is that they refined the idea, simplified it, and ultimately made it better.

A good social network is a hybrid of its predecessors, and this is exactly what Google has just achieved with Google+.

What makes Google+ so different.

Again, the key to a successful social network is one that is built purely to meet the demands of the general public. Translated into what needs to be achieved in order to harbour online loyalty, we simply need to look at what Facebook has done, and how Google+ has improved upon it.

Google+ addresses Facebook’s fatal flaws.

Facebook became popular because it virtually rendered Internet anonymity obsolete. All of a sudden, there was a social net work that was not only encouraging, but almost forcing you to be you online. It also introduced the status update, which left you feeling fanatical about checking your ‘newsfeed’ to see which one of your ‘friends’ was in a new relationship, who had chicken for dinner last night, which one of them got so drunk they passed out, etc.

For Facebook there were of course flaws. For example, everyone on your ‘friends’ list appears in your newsfeed, and everything you post appears in theirs. Unless you ‘block’ someone from viewing your profile, as long as you’re friends with them, then they’re always going to see what you’re up to. This element is kind of invasive. For example, if your boss adds you on Facebook (Hi, Trent!), or you’ve got your Great Aunty Flo on there, the next time you post something, let’s say “got way too drunk, ate a bunch of hotdogs and puked on my mate’s lawn”, then they’re going to know about it. 

Google+ addresses this major flaw in social networking by allowing you to assign the people you ‘follow’ into groups, or ‘circles’, from the get-go. You can have separate newsfeeds for family members, drinking buddies, work colleagues, team mates… You get the idea.

Google+ is born for mobile.

Google+ is a social network that will be born into the age of the smart phone, whereas the likes of Facebook have had to adapt. This is a massive new feature that Google+ boasts over its competitors because the social network is already engineered to fit in with a smart-phone savvy search engine. Unlike Facebook, when you upload photos on Google+ from your mobile, there is no load time. As soon as you take a picture – it’s online, waiting in a private album, ready for you to edit or delete.

It has a cleaner, intuitive user-interface

This means less time spent working out what you would like to do, and more time being able to organise and edit the content that matters most to you. I almost feel like I’m selling the product as I write this, but I actually endorse this feature 100%. Facebook is full of junk you couldn’t give a damn about. Your newsfeed can become littered by posts from fan pages you ‘liked’ and forgot about eons ago. If you make a mistake typing a status update, then you have to manually delete it and retype it. Google+ on the other hand gives you more control over what goes in and out of your primary newsfeed, lets you build up a hearty catalogue of ‘favourited’ links, and even lets you freely edit typing mistakes in posts without you have to delete anything.

In summing up – it’s definitely the simple things that will make Google+ big. Will it overtake Facebook? Well, Facebook certainly has a head start so one can only speculate. I think what it will do, however, is revolutionise the standard for social networking and force Facebook to reevaluate the core features of their network.

The formula that Google has concocted for Google+ is pure genius. We’ve been talking about it all week at Ziller, and we personally can’t wait to see it go live in the next couple of months!

What are your thoughts? Will Google+ throw Facebook off its pedestal?

This week, two representatives from Google and Bing shared an interview with one of the SEOMoz team members, and needless to say dropped a bit of a bombshell on search marketing after clearing the fog on one of SEO’s most vague of topics.

Do Facebook and Twitter, with their respective social authorities, have a an impact on SEO? The answer has been confirmed as yes.

It’s a revelation that has been a long time coming. After months of speculation after hearing of Google and Bing’s decision to buddy up with Twitter, and Google’s hint towards giving Facebook profiles more prominence in search results, a lot of us could see the possibility of the rumour becoming a reality – but we could never be certain.

In search engine optimisation, knowing the technical element of the practice made us a little skeptical towards acknowledging that search engines would one day let social authority influence search results – primarily due to the easy levels of manipulation that came with it as baggage.

But that’s exactly it. The answer is how the major search engines have coined the term, and how this term is to be literally applied to SEO.

‘Social/Author authority’ is something that both Google and Bing have deemed as having a legitimate influence on what users want to see when they’re searching for topics of interest, or trying to locate recorded conversation.

And regarding the influence on SEO? You’re only interested to hear about link weight, right? Well, let’s put it this way. Google and Bing are only interested in measuring signals indicative of ‘author quality’, implying that any link shared will be evaluated based on the impact of its context.

Something kind of like this:

One can envisage that the link weight would be calculated by things such as timing and relevancy, the surrounding content, the diversity of resources and even the level of engagement – but as to how the search engines calculate these factors, we can only speculate.

It looks likely that for now, the only way for a shared link in a social context to have any impact is for the user sharing it to be a powerful author/creator.

Google has even stated that author authority is independent of PageRank, however is limited to what topics of relevance it is applied to in search. It will be interesting to see how this kind of thing develops, however for the time being, unless you’re CNN or Ashton Kutcher – your social profile ain’t gonna have much of an impact!

But think about it… If a search engine were to try and identify and give value to a link placed within a viral context, how would it determine the link’s authority? Here’s a few interesting points:

1. You’d need to be the most popular kid in school – They’ve pretty much given this one away already, but for your link to be considered even remotely authoritative, the social profile through which you’re sharing it will need to be exceedingly popular. This is because the more users you have engaging with your social profile, the more human credibility you’re given. Google has always been about giving the users genuine material, search results that are generated by humans and targeted at humans. Bing also follows suit. It just makes sense.
2. The profile of the people interacting with you – If you are perceived to be a big fish, interacting with a pool full of sharks, then there’s going to be a lot more emphasis placed on what you say, and who you say it to. This would be a quintessential part of calculating author authority.
3. Reciprocity – The frequency of interactions and exchanges between profiles, who you are interacting with and who is interacting back.
4. Relevance of what you’re talking about – This one’s a no brainer. It needs to be relevant to something being searched.
5. Who you’re writing for – Obviously if you’re only out to give yourself a pat on the back, then the search engines aren’t going to regard your social commentary as important because you’re not contributing anything of objective, unbiased value.

What do you think?

to us, it’s clear that the major search engines are continuing their push towards more contextual organic search results. The good news is that its a significant step towards cleaning up search that is heavily populated by spam and artificial websites, the down side on the other hand, is that whist there will be a vast number of human-edited resources available, they may not always be as informative as intended.

For example, if I’m searching for a clear cut guide to caring for tropical fish, then I’m not going to want to have to dig through a whole heap of social conversation around the subject just to locate a solid answer to my question.

However, if I’m looking for experiences in caring for tropical fish – the vast availability of valued opinions is going to benefit me greatly, because I’m going to want to hear about what people have to say, and these guys will, too

As for online marketing, it may very well be time to sit down and re-assess your strategy, because the bond between SEO and social media just got even closer.

In recent times, Facebook has been at the centre of criticism when introducing new changes which included changes to the user interface as well as general changes to the core functionality. The criticism came from a large majority of their users, who really felt the new changes were not in their best interests – a Facebook group was even set-up to argue against the changes which attracted hundreds of thousands of users. I myself have liked all the changes Facebook have made to date however it was obvious the large majority of users, including some of my friends did not.

If you are a Facebook user you would of noticed recently that a new layout with a bunch of changes has been introduced, however this time I feel that there will not be so much fuss made about them as in the past few updates. This time Facebook have done something very smart, they have kept their users informed. When logging into your account for the first time since the changes have been introduced, right at the top in the prime position is a banner which explains that there have been changes along with why those changes are helpful.

If you click on the link in the banner, you are then taken to page which fully explains each of the different changes.

In any area of your business, keeping customers informed / updated should be one of your top priorities. This is no different to running a website – if people or users are kept informed they are going to be happy or at least happier then if you didn’t. I guarantee you if Facebook had of taken the same approach when rolling out their last few updates there would not of been such anger from users.

Why should my company waste time by writing and managing a blog?

If your company currently does not have a blog, or if you do have a blog but do not pay much attention to it, you should be asking yourself, what can a blog do for me?

Having an up to date blog attached to your company website, or even as a separate website, will allow you to gain credibility from your clients, as it will show what goes on behind the scenes of your business, help describe your company philosophy and also keep your own staff up to date on what each other is up to.

A blog will also allow you to be able to choose what relationship you build with your client:

• You can choose to show the human face of your company
• Way for customers to ask and give opinions on new products and or services
• Be a place where customers can share information and insights on their favorite products / services
• Alternative communication media to more friendly distribute information and knowledge to your staff

From a marketing point of view, a blog can strengthen your image and increase awareness of your products/services, and additionally if it is kept up to date and all content is well written, it can act as link bait and help increase links to your website which will significantly help with your search engine rankings.

So, ask yourself again, why not start a blog?

In my last post I wrote about a few tips on using using the social networking tool Twitter.  Although this post was relatively simple and explained a few tips, I have receievd feedback that some people still don’t get what Twitter is about. They know kind of what it is and how to use it, but don’t really see the point. I found a good little video that does explain how Twitter works, and is well worth a look. Check it out.

Twitter is quickly becoming a very big and very powerful social networking website as more and more users start to embrace it. Massive in the U.S., Twitter is yet to fully take hold of Australian’s however according to recent stats this will quickly change. Sandra Hanchard a Hitwise analyst recently blogged how Twitter achieved a record usage in Australia for the week ending on January 10th.

Now even though I am sure most of you reading this post have heard of Twitter before, for many people there is still much mystery about it and exactly how it works. Put simply, Twitter is a social networking service that allows users to post updates, and receive other users updates by entering a text based post of no more then 140 characters, if you are on facebook It is very similar to updating your facebook status. You can follow users on twitter, and other users can follow you, you only see updates from users you are following, and vice versa.

Even though it seems really simple, there is a little more to it which I will try and explain here.

1. Updates

These are your standard updates. You log into twitter and write an update which everyone following you will see in their main timeline. When someone you are following writes an update you will see it in your main timeline.

2. Replies

If you start a update with an @ character followed by a users name, and then your message, this is called a reply. Its like talking to a group of people however addressing a certain person in that group. When you reply to someone, that user will see it in their main timeline, if they are following you. They will see it under their reply tab regardless of if they are following you or not.

3. Direct Messages

If you start a update with a d and then the users name, this is a direct message, and is similar to whispering – only that user will hear you. This will only work if that user is following you.

4. Links

There are times when you may want to post a URL in your update, however considering you only have 140 characters to work with, you may be able to see how this could become a issue, as many URL’s are more then 140 characters by themselves.  To fix this Twitter uses a service called TinyURL which automatically shortens URL’s when you enter them, so if you see a URL like http://tinyurl.com/bcajs4 you will now understand what it is.

I hope this post has helped clarify a few things. Ziller has a Twitter profile and if you are on Twitter do check us out. We will be updating with most of our blog posts and latest Ziller news.