A couple blog posts ago my business partner Jason wrote about 5 Reasons Google+ will Fail and +1 Why it Will Succeed. The main reason (that he touched on) Google+ will fail is that they are simply too late to the party. If Google had launched their social networking solution at or around the same time as Facebook then they might have had a chance, but waiting until Facebook is the third largest country on the planet by numbers is just too late!
The one reason Jason cited as a possible way Google+ could succeed is because of Google’s domination in search. When you’re logged in to Google+, your posts now appear in search results. Does this mean that companies will have no choice but to create Google+ profiles and post content? I think the jury is still out here, but I’d have to argue YES. You simply can’t ignore a media outlet that will – it seems – get preferential treatment from the largest, most dominant search engine available. For this reason I think Google+ could potentially succeed in the long run… or will it?
It seems that Google has made its way into nearly every facet of our lives these days, but there will come a time when it will go too far. Is this it? In August of this year, Google’s search engine market share fell below 65 percent for the first time in two years, and while September’s figures show a slight rebound, could this provide the opening that Yahoo and Bing have been waiting for to capitalize on market share improvement?
Time will ultimately tell – for both its search market share and Google+ life expectancy, but I do not like that Google is putting in place a social media networking platform that might become a requirement for search engine optimization efforts or even decent search rankings. This seems to fly in the face of providing relevant and accurate results, and takes the social out of social networking.