Google had announced the closing of Google Plus, earlier this year but Google never revealed the real reason. The real flaw was in its security that exposed user’s entire data, which holds details like name, email id, occupation, DOB, gender, and most importantly profile pictures. However, this flaw was said to be fixed in March but that did not happen.
This flaw has exposed around 500,000 users, which will affect loads across the network. However, the number is pretty huge, but in comparison to its biggest rival Facebook, it is too small, as Facebook has 2.2 billion active users per month.
Google plus has always been a topic of discussion since 2011, about its worthiness with a few in its favor and a few against it. Google has also somewhere agreed and made a statement that Google plus has a low usage and maximum of its users lasts only for 5 seconds. Google plus has not lived up to the expected expectation, and could not compete with Facebook.
Google Plus Did Some Good for the SEO Community:
Although Google plus is about to close down, but it has still done some Good things for SEO community to remember. Those who are there since a while on the search engine marketing would remember Google +1 button, which was launched back in 2011. This was taken as a ranking signal. The end users should +1 your content, the more number you attained the better it was. This remained in your Google profile and was visible when your social circle searched something recommended by you. Google later revealed that this was not a ranking signal.
One another feature was “Circles” that helped to differentiate users in specific groups or lists. Though it was not a very convenient tool but once you got a hold of it. It was the easiest way of sharing content with specific contacts.
Google plus Communities another convincing feature that allowed users to form groups according to the interest, organization or business. This gave opportunity to meet likeminded users. Though Google plus did have a few promising features but due to mismanagement it could not be saved from its loss.
What Should You Do Next?
As Google plus is giving at least a years time, until August 2019 and then it would close down. Google plus will also provide a solution to download or transfer all the data & activities that are going on, on Google Plus which is extremely important and valuable for customers.
Big brands like Coca-cola who have built 2.2 million users and has so much data. This data needs to be downloaded or migrated to some other social media channel. Though its activity and engagement has reduced since 2016, hence there is not much on the network.
If you had an active account with good visibility and traffic on Google Plus then start thinking about your data and to migrate it. Choose the social media you want to upload it to and start thinking about capitalizing your already put efforts.
Conclusion:
Google plus had a lot of potential but it failed to prove itself. Will Google be able to prove in future and launch a better social network site? Well what a big question raised?
But we should not forget that Google is the second largest search engine in the world and owns one of the best social networking sites, “Youtube”.
Google will stay committed to G suite subscriber. Google believes that Google plus was more of an enterprise product. Where groups can engage in discussions on a safe corporate social network. Looking forward to see some progress on this front soon.
