If you're yet to hear the news, the new Social Network Google+ is currently in limited trial. Be clear though, the social battle between Facebook and Google+ is about advertising revenues. Where there's people, there's sales potential.
Google+ has strong potential to be a real winner. This isn't another adhoc Google Buzz or Google Wave either. The coin has finally dropped within GooglePlex that everything they do needs to be social-centric.
Facebook has opposition on many fronts when it comes to privacy and a lack of granular sharing of your personal information. Another powerful social network will attract it's own following and that's a boon for businesses looking to expand to another audience.
So What's Great About Google+ ?
The interface for one thing. It's sleek, minimal and sexy. The hand of Apple's original Macintosh designer is obvious. Strong HTML5 technology prevails which makes for a wonderful user experience - if you love using something, chances are you'll use it longer.
'Circles' is a term within Google+ for a far better granular approach to being able to share different content with a select number of your friends. Where as Facebook typically goes for the 'all or nothing' approach, I can see Google has done it's research on sharing and is headed down the right path here.
An example of this in action might be only sharing photos from your Sunday picnic with the family and friends that attended - you simply drag those people into a 'circle' of their own and share the pics to that circle. Clean and easy.
Check out the intro video below for a quick overview of Google+
But What's In It For Business?
An instant and gigantic social network springing to life! They want your business' advertising dollar and need to be committed to attract and maintain a huge audience of active, social and consuming participants (that's all of us incidentally) to target advertising towards. That's great for business.
While Facebook currently has 750 million users, there's an awful lot of people who are yet to engage in a social network. The challenge for Google+ will be activating their billions of users through the social plugins across across all of their applications (Picasa, Gmail, Docs, Reader and iGoogle). When it goes live this take-up could be incredible.
It's also going to impact on the way we do SEO as well. Some months ago, the Google +1 button was also introduced - that's similar to the Facebook 'Like' button. We can see now this was pre-populating Google+ with it's own content shares. So SEO content spread from your business blogs, for example, needs to be mindful about mixing in Google+ for it's 'soon to be live' introduction.
What Are Your Thoughts?
Do you think Google+ would lure you away from Facebook as your social network of choice? Please let us know in the comments.
Martin is the General Manager at Traffika. Follow him on Twitter @Martin_Cooney or Google+
