In our technology-driven world, social networking sites have invaded the lives of billions of people worldwide. Rarely would you see someone who has not yet engaged or created a profile in at least one of these sites. Distance and timezone barriers are breached by such sites since it enables people to communicate and stay connected with their family, friends, colleagues and other acquaintances anytime, anywhere. This is the very reason why these sites became popular among the public. Studies have shown that social networking is now the world’s number one online activity, occupying 20% of online time. With Facebook and Twitter as two of the biggest names in the industry, what can Google Plus bring to the table in order to come out at the top? The answer is simply their SEO Strategy. Google is clever enough to utilize smart Search Engine Optimization techniques. In an article by Cyrus Shepard entitled “How Google+ Uses SEO to Steal Search from Facebook and Twitter”, he breaks down the 6 SEO strategies that Google Plus has put into play, which has given them the winning edge over other social networking sites. This included innovative link building tactics, public sharing, on-page optimization and making use of descriptive title tags. Although Twitter posts are public by default, it has a character limit that is far from being considered as “rich” content while Facebook only allows Google to return search results for posts coming from fan pages and not from regular profiles. These limits can be the factor that can make Google Plus way ahead of its competitors. Google Plus highly encourages public sharing by generally making posts public. Therefore, each and every post is being crawled and indexed by Google. Being indexed by Google simply means that your posts will be listed in Google’s search results. In effect, Google Plus profiles usually rank higher than the rankings of both Facebook and Twitter profiles combined. Social networking sites have similar features in common and these just amp up the competition even more. For instance, Google Plus has the +1 button while Facebook has the “Like” button. Google Plus has Hangouts while Facebook uses Skype for video and group chats. Google Plus has Circles while Facebook has smart friend lists. One common feature that can seriously impact all three social networking sites are the brand pages. Brand pages allows businesses to establish brand presence in the world of social media. IT allows businesses to interact with their customers and attract potential customers as well. However, when it comes to brand pages, Google Plus is one step ahead of Facebook and Twitter with the integration of the Direct Connect search tool. There is a lot of marketing potential for businesses with Google Plus. One is through using +1s which help businesses advertise smarter by using +1s in AdWords ads, websites and Google+ Pages. +1s help Google determine how relevant a business listing or ad might be. Google Plus helps businesses get more relevant traffic by tying together +1s to make content more relevant to fans and potential customers. The Circles feature in Google+ gives businesses more control over posts and status updates by giving them the ability to better identify who receives communications. Basically, this feature allows you to categorize people based on how you know them. If created with the right strategy in mind, Circles can effectively become a direct marketing tool for businesses to promote products and services to specific or targeted audiences. And as previously mentioned, Google+ integrates user generated content such as posts into Google’s search results. This results to an increase in visibility and thus an increase in traffic. Facebook has been dominating the social media scene for quite some time now. It currently boasts of having around 800 million users worldwide, which makes it way ahead of its competitors. However, Google Plus is consistently showing signs of growth. Since its launch back in June 2011, it has currently gathered more than 50 million active users. No other social network in history has achieved such a huge following in just a short span of time. This just shows that Google Plus will be not be saying its goodbyes anytime soon.
