Most Used Platforms: Are Haters Gonna Hate? Let's Talk About Google+

After reading the topic for this week’s discussion, Most Used Platforms, I began my search by looking for what the number one platform is. I found a website that had this fantastic graph:

As you can tell, Facebook is the clear winner with little brother YouTube jogging to attempt to keep up. This made sense to me, as it seems that everybody and their dog has a FB (I mean that quite literally, I follow four accounts for people’s dogs. If you’re not following Doug the Pug, are you even really living?) As I continued to scan down the graph I found myself chuckling about how Yahoo! Answers - the bargain brand, Western Family of search engines - had outranked Google+ by a small, but significant amount. This got me thinking, why does Google+ get such a bad rap? For a platform that has 300 million users, (Google+ beats out Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, and Twitter in the number of users!) you’d think that it would be more popular among the social media platforms. This peaked my interest even more, so I started to search for answers as to why people seem to dislike Google+ as much as they do.

After reading for a while I started noticing recurring complaints about why people seem to hate Google+:

1. “It’s a lame version of Facebook - I don’t understand the circles thing”
2. “There is a forced sign in”
3. “It’s just another platform”
4. “Google+ is a failed project”
5. “Google+ ruined YouTube”

After reading all these articles, (1, 2, 3 - the third one is actually a google forum complaining about Google+...on google...while using their Google+ accounts to complain, which makes me chuckle) I began to wonder if there was actual truth behind these complaints, or if it was more of a bandwagon effect. I started to investigate their claims and see if there was actual validity behind them, with help/more information from this website I was able to help develop my own rebuttals to many of the complaints.

“Google is just a lame version of Facebook - I don’t understand the circles - It’s a copycat”

            Rebuttal: Isn’t Facebook a lame version of Twitter??? - I’ll save that argument for another time. But in all seriousness, Google+ actually functions much better than Facebook ever could. “Facebook conversions are falling, Google+ conversions are rising. Google+ search, tools, SEO and community segmentation is better, so is their privacy. As time wears on, Google+ continues to grow, improve and excel” (SocialMediaImpact.com). As for the circles - it’s actually quite simple. You organize people into groups and then can choose what groups you want to see the things you post, that’s it! Nothing too complicated about that. Facebook has actually developed a new tool that does this exact same thing, only they call it groups. Who’s the copycat now?

“Google+ is just another platform - has failed YouTube - failed project”

            Rebuttal: Google runs the world, and “Google+ is single handily changing the world of SEO. If for no other reason, you need an account to feed your SEO efforts. Plus no other platforms aside from LinkedIn give you direct access to influencers for marketing purposes” (SocialMediaImpact.com).  If you have a business and you’re not utilizing Google+, you seriously need to rethink your marketing strategy. And no, Google+ didn’t fail YouTube, it SAVED YouTube. YouTube is in the safest hands possible with Google in charge. So what, you can no longer post your mean comments on videos anonymously? What a travesty.

            So, overall I think that Google+ is getting more hate than it deserves. I get that there are some functions that are irritating and it takes some time to get used to but isn’t that how it is with all new platforms you join? Besides there is one part of Google+ that I personally enjoy the most and use it over any other platform that performs the same function: Google Hangouts. Google Hangouts are probably the coolest thing about Google+. I don’t know about you, but I ALWAYS have terrible connectivity problems when I use Skype, FaceTime or any other video chat platform. Google Hangouts has great video quality and I rarely experience any troubles with it. It also comes with these fun special effects so you can draw on the screen, play sounds, screen share, change your background, and so many other possibilities.