Why you must move from Face­book to Google+

By Michael Q. Todd. Right now is an ex­tremely in­ter­est­ing time as there is a mas­sive swing from Face­book to Google+ happening.

This post will ex­am­ine some trends and as­pects of the mi­gra­tion that will fas­ci­nate you.

I am not go­ing to show you a whole lot of user num­ber graphs. These are my per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ences and I have doc­u­mented them in var­i­ous ways for you.

Some of the con­tent in this blog post is live and you can in­ter­act with it.

Ad­ver­tis­ing

Google is now al­low­ing you to cre­ate a Google+ post and pro­moted it as an ad­sense ad­ver­tise­ment. Peo­ple on any web­site us­ing ad­sense can +1 it and in­ter­act on it. They will be shown in Gmail. Think of the possibilities.

Or­ga­ni­za­tion tools

Google+ is light years ahead of Face­book for tools and analytics.

• Learn all about your ac­count and any­body elses‘ with Cir­cle Count.
• Cir­cle peo­ple, mes­sage cir­cles and cre­ate events that are ac­tu­ally seen by the peo­ple you in­vite to them.
• Rip­ples will show you who your key en­gagers and shar­ers are.
• Com­mu­ni­ties where you can di­vide posts into categories.make your cir­cles with Circloscope.
• Analyse your ac­count with Steady De­mand (use the code michaelq­todd when you join to get a discount).

Here is an ex­am­ple of a Rip­ple from a cir­cle share a friend did yes­ter­day. See how at the bot­tom you can ac­tu­ally “play” the rip­ple of shares.

Re­ac­tion to posts

I have 5,000 highly en­gaged Face­book friends and a fairly pop­u­lar pro­file. My an­a­lyt­ics tell me that I get around 1500 Face­book com­ments and 3000 “like” clicks a week.

I have run 2 tests with al­most iden­ti­cal pieces of con­tent at the same time on Google+ and face­book in the past week. In both cases the Google+ post got over 10 times the +1‘s (as com­pared to likes), com­ments and shares. Yes over 10 times.

If we are not pre­pared to pay to pro­mote our con­tent Face­book is hid­ing it. This is par­tic­u­larly the case if you post a link or even if any­one posts a link in the com­ment thread. If you try to show a You Tube video you can com­pletely for­get about it get­ting seen.

SEO

The de­fault search op­tion for Google is so­cial. I just reached the num­ber 2 and 3 spot on the front page for a search for the word Wen­yard (new on­line stock­mar­ket game) with Google+ posts. The third place one is a share by Bernard Piette of my Christ­mas You Tube video. The sec­ond place one I sim­ply added the URL to my blog post about Wen­yard to a Google+ post.

If you add a URL into your post, any +1s you get will be cred­ited to that link.

I am av­er­ag­ing around 7–8,000 +1s for my site each week. Enough said. be­cause Google will now show your posts about cer­tain key­words to peo­ple who cir­cle you you need to have as many peo­ple cir­cling you as pos­si­ble. You also need to have peo­ple with many cir­cling them shar­ing your posts.

Hang­outs

How well have you got to know Face­book friends. Google takes it to a new level with hang­outs. Talk­ing face to face with friends and some­times new peo­ple is fun. The range of tools avail­able in hang­outs is in­cred­i­ble. You can fil­ter the au­di­ence to any­thing you want. One per­son or a whole cir­cle or com­mu­nity. Then there are Hang­outs on Air where you broad­cast live to an un­lim­ited au­di­ence. Did you see what we did with the Christ­mas Give­away Hang­out last week? We only had the idea for this 3 and a half days be­fore. We reached thou­sands. Af­ter wards you can au­to­mat­i­cally archive the Hang­out on Air in your YouTube account.

In­dia and China

I am get­ting a huge num­ber of In­di­ans and Chi­nese cir­cling me and en­gag­ing on my posts. Think of the fu­ture. Will your brand want a pres­ence in China? Face­book is banned in China. In­dia has eas­ily the sec­ond high­est num­ber of Google+ users be­hind the USA.

Cir­cle sharing

Please un­der­stand and em­brace the power of this. The weekly Mega­ball cir­cle share that I started a month ago has now been shared around 3,500 times. It is not so hard to make these and get them shared. Some of the peo­ple in­cluded in the Mega­Ball have re­ported in­creases in their Google+ fol­lower counts up­wards of 4,000 peo­ple in those 5 weeks.

These are the 4 most pop­u­lar cir­cle shares of all time. As­sessed by unique pub­lic shares.

This is a live em­bed­ded post. Please +1 and share! Please set it to Pub­lic so Cir­cle Count will recog­nise it.

Blog com­ments

This week, I added the Evolve plu­gin to this blog and dis­cov­ered maybe 10,000 con­ver­sa­tion threads about my posts on Google+ that I did not even know ex­isted. Every time some­body shares a post to Google+, the con­ver­sa­tion hap­pens right on my site. Face­book wanted the con­ver­sa­tion hap­pen­ing in their place, but Google does not mind. I am now us­ing Google+ as my de­fault com­ment op­tion and it is work­ing great.

Face­book is still a great place to be I am not ad­vo­cat­ing leav­ing it al­to­gether. What will be the main place to get bang for your time on­line buck in say two years time though? Surely Google+ is a no-brainer to switch your pri­mary al­le­giance to right now. It seems to me that every day it is grow­ing stronger and stronger.

Have your say ei­ther in the com­ments be­low (both Face­book and Google+ are avail­able) or on this in­ter­ac­tive list.