We suspect that the news of Google+ shutting down within a few months would not have come as a surprise to many. In early October, Google announced that they would be closing the social media platform down by August 2019, due to a data breach that exposed the private data of up to 500,000 users. Here at Thunderbolt, we like to keep up with the latest new on digital marketing in Surrey, so we were wondering – will the end of Google+ have any impact on the digital marketing industry?
Social media
Google’s attempt at creating its own social media platform failed to achieve the success of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and it’s main problem was that it never really found it’s audience. Google admitted in their own blog post that “The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.”
This means that users aren’t finding any engaging content, or they simply arrived there by mistake! Given that Google+ never really established themselves amongst their peers in the beginning, their absence from the social media arena shouldn’t have a major impact.
SEO
As a marketer, you may have used Google+ as part of your SEO strategy! A lot of users and businesses never saw the point in opening up a Google+ account as they were sceptical of how much it really benefited their business. However, opening up a Google+ helped with SEO because social presence was part of the search algorithm, albeit a small part. The good news is that the end of Google+ won’t hurt your SEO, because there are so many other contributing factors to good SEO!