When you work in an industry sometimes there are tools you just have to use. For SEO professionals, like me, anything Google put out deserves your attention. Google+ (or Google Plus) is the latest, greatest, most publicized tool for SEO out there and there has been a lot of buzz about Google promoting it. I’ve been resistant to use it, but today I decided to set it up for e-Marketing Partner.
Too many Google accounts
It’s just too easy to end up with multiple Google accounts. I can’t remember all the reasons why right now, but I have two major Google accounts as well as multiple accounts I’ve setup for clients. Google doesn’t offer any method to consolidate or merge these accounts. To my knowledge, it’s not even possible to move specific items to a different account without losing all of the historical data. My personal Google+ account was already setup under one Google account, and my places page under another account, so I now have Google+ pages under two different accounts. Awesome.
No one I know is using Google+
There are over 400 people on my Facebook friends list, at least there was before Facebook went through their latest redesign and put hid it. After setting up Google+, I type in the names of a few of my tech savvy friends and get nothing. There is a nice and simple 10 step process for importing Facebook contacts into Google+ via Yahoo and Gmail. I chose not to go that route, so I’m stuck without friends in my circles.
Google+ lets you follow celebrities, just like Twitter
Finally a page pops up that goes through a little wizard and comes up with “Follow public posts from interesting and famous people – Add celebrities, journalists, photographers, and more to your circles to see what they’re sharing publicly.” So… is the whole point of Google+ to follow famous people? Isn’t that what Twitter is for? So there are circles and there are follows and there are different circles in the follows? So confusing.
Will Google+ get better?
Will Google+ improve? I’ve waited quite some time to focus on Google+ because I was hoping that it would get better, but so far I’m not sure it has. Facebook is relatively easy to understand, easy to use and easy to share things across. Google+ should follow suit. Unfortunately Zuckerberg and company are doing everything possible to make FB more confusing and harder to use every day, trying to bring Facebook down to G+’s level.
The journey for the perfect social media platform isn’t over. Google will eventually either figure out how to make Google+ better or scrap it like they have with so many other projects. In the mean time, it probably won’t hurt to use it for SEO purposes, but it’s just too frustrating and difficult to deal with for the average non geek to migrate to, and it’s of little use without a more serious userbase.
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