So I've recently (ie. the past year), found myself swinging between Facebook and Google+ as my main Social Media promotional tool.
Both sites have their merits, but both also drive me nuts in their own little ways.Below is my little (hugely incomplete) pros and cons list of these two web giants:Let's compare!!
Pros:
- Clearly a larger, more active social community.
- Just about everyone in the world has a profile and checks it more than they do emails or text messages. This creates a huge 'potential' audience. Winner!
- It has hashtags
- If someone 'likes' your stuff, all their chums see it... James Woodley likes this!
- 'Boosted posts' do actually seems to work. If your goal is to simply engage with as many people as possible, write/post something interesting, spend $5 boosting it and you have tens of thousands of potential viewers that you would not have had otherwise.
Cons:
- Saturated with crap, the 21st Century version of 'chain mail', annoying complaining people and pictures of people's lunch.
- The hashtags don't work the way I want them to (maybe I'm doing something wrong).
- Did I mention the people complaining??
- To really get noticed, you have to pay.
- Way too commercial.
- It changes every 5.5 seconds.
- People seem to lose their minds if, heaven forbid, they get un-friended by you or anyone they know.
- NO, I DO NOT WANT TO PLAY CANDY CRUSH SAGA WITH YOU!!!!
Google+
Pros:
- Handles media like a dream. The galleries are just perfect for photographers to display their hard work.
- SEO is super duper optimized... Who uses Bing and or Yahoo! for searches nowadays anyway? :-/ What I mean by this, is that anyone entering a search in Google, will also see results from your G+ page, if you so wish.
- The whole 'Circles' thing makes it a whole lot easier to divide up your categories of contacts.
- The community seems to be more, what's the word, civil? Maybe that's just me. But it's like the difference between the spectators of a cage fight and those of a polo match.
- It has hashtags that actually do what they're meant to do.
- It's not necessarily photographer related, but I love Google hangouts... You can put virtual hats on people, for crying out loud! :-D
- It will automatically tag people in pictures. This is hit and miss, but I'm sure it will improve with time.
- You can get in early for maximum exposure to those that actually matter... Like buying shares in Apple 20 years ago..... If only.
Cons:
- Arrived too late in the game, so everyone compared it to Facebook and immediately dismissed it.
- In my opinion, was not complete on the day of launch... I mean, no business pages?!? Huh???
- It can just be too damn fiddly sometimes.
- Too many options to wrap your head around.
- The separation of 'Google local' (formerly Google Places) & Google+ at the outset meant that if you didn't do things right at the beginning, you'd end up with two separate profiles for your business... Bummer.
- The mobile app for the iPhone/iPad does not yet let you use the chat feature... Oh dear.
- Lack of 'vanity' URL's unless you're pre-selected... Why?? They can map the entire world in 360 degrees at street level, but I can't have a URL for my page that resembles an earthly language?!?... Breath..... Breeaaatthh.
Well, that's just my opinion. I'm sure after I hit publish on this post I will think of a dozen more reasons, but for now that are the ones that affect me the most.
