Whenever I mention Google+ in presentations or talks about social and digital tools for hotels, I get a lot of blank stares and the occasional whispered “Is Google+ still around?”, so it’s perhaps time to look a little deeper into Google’s “social networking” offerings.
Founded in 2011, Google+ grew to 500 million registered users within its first year and currently has approximately 235 million active monthly users.
Perhaps surprisingly, Google+ surpassed Twitter earlier this year and is now the second largest social networking site in the world, yet a lot of internet users and marketers still seem to have difficulties in trying to make sense of the service.
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The main reason people struggle with Google+, in my opinion, is that it’s so much more than just a social network. Google+ isn’t Facebook and never set out to challenge Facebook or even replace it.
Rather, Google+ is Google’s attempt to influence the long-running power struggle between “search” and “social” and make “being social” online a little more like ‘being social’ in real life.
Traditionally strong in “search”, Google realised that its weakness was social networking — a domain firmly occupied by Facebook, which, however, until recently wasn’t a very useful service for searching for things (if you have ever tried to find a particular piece of information through a search on Facebook, you know what I am referring to).
To gain market share and capture more than just “search” users, Google created Google+. Part social network, part identity service (i.e. it provides users with an online identity for use across a large variety of platforms and services, which can also be tracked by web analytics and marketers), part “central hub for everything Google” (i.e. it integrates all other Google products, e.g. YouTube, Picasa, etc.), Google+ is still constantly evolving.
Online Connections
At the heart of Google+ are “circles” – your online connections. As an individual Google+ user, you might decide to split your online connections across circles like “friends”, “work colleagues”, or “people I went to school with” — it’s far easier to “segment” your Google+ connections than it is to group your Facebook friends. As a result, you can share updates in a far more targeted and secure manner on Google+.
This also works from a business perspective using Google+ brand pages. You could, for example, divide your followers into categories like “UAE”, “bloggers”, or “people interested in Italian food”, which gives you highly useful, segmented, marketing lists and allows you to share the right content with the right people at exactly the right time.
Perhaps the best incentive for maintaining an active Google+ brand page for hotels is the strong integration of Google+ business pages into Google search. Provided you update your Google+ company page consistently, internet users searching for your hotel on Google will be greeted by a highly visible Google+ company page box on the right side of their screens.
A lot of information is at their fingertips, from the address, contact telephone number, right through to the ability to enquire about availability and room rates. The box also shows your page’s most recent post – an added attraction for users to click for further information.
Used this way, a Google+ company page becomes a weapon in your fight for market share and considerably increases your property’s online visibility.
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