Facebook maintains that the action was consistent with the plans that were announced earlier in April, and that the Facebook email address can be used by friends not on the network who wish to contact you, however it has received an overly negative response. Users are maintaining it wasn’t made clear that Facebook would be setting the new email address as the default, and has been described as a Gmail Killer and an attempt to try and keep people on Facebook by making them reliant on yet another feature. For those with the Apple iOS 6 upgrade with Facebook integration, you might not have even noticed Facebook sneakily "updating" your iPhone address book by deleting orginal email addresses and replacing them with the Facebook version, until you realised your emails were no longer reaching their recipients and had instead been sent to their Facebook Pages. Don’t stress though – Facebook will be rolling out a feature so you can decide which email address you want to show in your profile information!
This seems to be the final straw with a lot of users, particularly after the recent launch of promoted posts, constant adverts and the on-going question of security of personal data. Business Page owners are being encouraged to pay more and more for adverts, promoted posts and sponsored stories. What has really been highlighted as an issue with small business owners is that their paid promoted posts aren’t even aimed at getting their Page more Likes, it is to ensure more of their existing fans will see their content in the first place. As a result many have decided to take the leap and look for alternative social networks elsewhere. The favoured choice?
Google+
It appears Google+ users are no longer limited to Google employees and software engineers, and that the inevitable switch from Facebook to Google is well underway. With big celebrities and social media icons such as George Takei establishing a presence on Google+ it won’t be long before the rest follow.
There are actually a lot of advantages to using Google+ in favour of Facebook, the obvious one being that it is run by Google. This immediately helps with your SEO, as Google is one of the biggest search engines and ranks Google+ very high in search results. It is easier to search on it by specific interest than Facebook mainly because between Google and Bing, Google is the superior search engine.
Even the way you manage your online relationships is smoother with Google+. Circles are a more realistic way of managing what content gets shared with which people, and because there is no Edge Rank or similar algorithm you can actually see everything your contacts are sharing with you. More importantly because you can control and tailor your posts to a specific audience, you can control who is seeing your posts.
Google’s privacy settings are much more up font and obvious than Facebook who are renowned for having their default settings set to public. Google has a “data liberation” feature which means you are able to pack up and walk away with all your data anytime you want, as opposed to Facebook who own every piece of data you share on the website.
If you’re running a business the chances are you are already using at least one of Google’s services such a Gmail, Google maps, Google Chrome, Google docs or YouTube. Google+ is obviously integrated with all these services, and if you have a Gmail account the setup of your Google+ account is basically nonexistent.
Even the feel of the site is cleaner. It runs faster because it is not as congested, there are no friend requests – you just add people to circles you feel they fit in, and the hot topic adjustment sliders mean you can control how much or how little of a type of story you see in your news feed.
It is packed with cool features such as Hangouts – multi person webcam conversations in which you have the ability to share documents as well as host Q&A sessions and talk face to face with potential clients. You can even edit any of your posts or comments after you have posted them.
Even the advertising is better; using keyword contextual targeting, and displaying ads related to topics and interests in a user’s browser history they are more relevant (and less spammy). Google are tough on abuse and spam, and as a result you are more likely to be getting useful information and relevant content in your Google+ newsfeed than you would on other social networking sites.
When lined up next to its major competitors, Google+ is clearly a superior social media platform - unfortunately it will never be very good if no one else is using it. That being said, it was only 4 years ago that the world made the move from MySpace to Facebook and no one has looked back since!
Thinking about moving your business onto Google+? Call us today on 1300 966 266