Gobsmacked™ Series:
A Google+ community about how to use Google+ as customer-interaction channel.
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Experts and users of Google+: We have lots of questions for you. Come, join our Google+ community Gobsmacked™.
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Current estimates indicate that Google+ (which started in 2011), has 343 million active users and 100,000+ communities, whereas LinkedIn has 238 million users and 1.5 million LinkedIn Groups.
Most LinkedIn members use their profile for professional branding purposes. The active LinkedIn members engage in business development and job search/placement activities. In contrast, initially many Google+ users used the features for personal interactions such as photo-sharing with family, hangout with family and friends. Also many G+ users don't realise that their personal posts are making it to the public webspace and that they should reset their visibility preferences of posts and "About" page. Those users detered others from engaging with them.
However, the demand and growth of Google+ has been phenomenal this year. Moreover, after LinkedIn deployed an unprecedented and Members-UNfriendly policy called Sitewide Automated Moderation (SWAM), thousands of professionals and small businesses are exploring and migrating to Google+. Those who are active in Google+, are more than ever separating their professional profile from their personal profile and are engaging at different levels.
If you are considering to put your efforts into only one channel that helps you manage your customers better and more effectively, then you must start by comparing the features of each channel. The following tables compares all the known features available (as of September 1, 2013) with a free LinkedIn Membership and a Google+ profile (which is free).
The features marked in "blue" are the ones that we consider as very user-Friendly. The features marked in "red" are the ones that we consider as user-UNfriendly.
Overall
| Feature | Google+ | |
| People | Circles, Pages, Communities | Connections |
| Companies | Circles, Pages, Communities | Company Pages |
| Posts | Text, Photos, Links, Videos, GIFs |
Text, Links and Image files |
| No limit on text/character count |
Limit on number of characters in post |
|
| Tag people and pages with @ and + |
Tag people and companies with @ |
|
| Add hashtag for global SEO | Does not contribute to SEO | |
| Discussions | Communities: Private, Public with invite moderation, Public-Open | LinkedIn Groups: Private, Public with invite moderation, Public-Open |
| Home | Home | Home |
| Login | Email Automatic sign-on with login to any other Google products |
|
| Like | "+s" | "Like" |
| Mobile App | Available | Available |
