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Why Do Marketing Managers Continue To Ignore Google+?

The following piece was originally published in my regular column at Forbes.com:
Why, indeed. Online Marketing exec Ciaran Treacy, in Dublin, notes in a recent post for The Sociablethat when he goes into a company to set up social media they tend to focus on where the populace currently is, not “where I need to be.”
Particularly for older/established marketing leads they consider Facebook to be dominating youth, Twitter dominating influencers, LinkedIn dominating professionals… and Google? As it turns out, Treacy points out, Google dominates “search”.
The operative concept here is “because it’s Google”. By being tied into the biggest search engine in the world, Google is able to intrinsically pull results from other Google properties, such as YouTube, especially, but also from all other social platforms (whereas the locations such as Facebook are pretty much a “walled garden,” Treacy remarks).
Even as the newest entrant to the social media party (Google+ premiered in Summer 2011), Google+ is the second largest social media platform in the world. It is second only to Facebook with more than 500M registered users of which 135M post active updates, according to Carter Hostelley, the founder and CEO of LeadTail.com, a company that focuses on online marketing research, consulting and tools.
When Carter asks marketers what’s keeping themfrom jumping on the Google+ bandwagon, this is what he said he hears most often:
  • I’m already on the other social networks and don’t need another one
  • I have no reason to be on Googl
  • I tried it but gave up since nothing really was going
  • It’s not a real social experience, so it was boring
  • It’s not intuitive and too hard to understand
Carter mentions another reason for marketers’ relative lagging adoption is that Google+ is not yet highly cross-posted to Twitter – the most recent LeadTails report about Marketing Executives on Twitter shows that in Twitter cross-posting Google+ is not even within the top ten, while LinkedIn, Instagram, Vine, Facebook and Pinterest were all on the list. That report will be updated with new data within the next two weeks, Carter says, and I will report any significant updates when the new research appears.
What’s the biggest reason for marketers to get over the hurdles, according to Carter? “I ask my clients, ‘Do you want to show up higher in search?’” Yes, they certainly do. Furthermore, Google+’ ability to hook into destination websites is an extremely attractive means to drive content and authorship delivery and to support efficient ecommerce.
To continue reading please visit my regular Forbes column.