6 Reasons To Leave Facebook For Google Plus – And 3 Reasons Not To

December 19, 2012 · Brandon Hann

Google Plus is the new kid on the block and compared to Facebook, it’s still a small kid. However, Google Plus has been gaining huge momentum in the last year that it has been available. Part of this gain has been from the fact that Google operates on so many levels within the web community and Google+ interacts seamlessly with almost all of them. Plus, it helped that Google began forcing all YouTube users to link their accounts with a Google+ profile. So even though Google+ has over 400 million users, only about 100 million are active on a monthly basis.

It might seem like a daunting task to start fresh on a large-scale social networking site considering that you’ve likely been on Facebook for so many years now, but after my experiences with Google Plus, I’m about ready to drop Facebook completely! But let’s not jump the gun completely…check out the pros and cons below to see if Google+ is right for you.

Reasons to jump ship

Advertising – Facebook is full of it. It’s not always so apparent too. With all the adverts for game requests, sponsored links and now promoted wall posts, Facebook has become a haven for cyber junk that you are probably getting really sick of. I know I am. Now, this doesn’t mean that Google+ doesn’t have the potential for falling into the same traps, but my guess is that since Google has more than one service, they don’t need Google+ to be their cash cow. Whereas Facebook now has shareholders to answer to, it’s very possible that advertising could get worse for them.
Integration – Facebook integrates well with other online services and websites, but it’s still a very separate platform. Google+ is basically the backbone of the majority of Google services so when you log into Gmail, you are already logged into Google+, YouTube, Drive and more! The best part is that practically all of these services are well-integrated and they cross-manipulate one another.

Google Events – Yes Facebook has events, but they are like Google’s. On Google+, you can create an event, invite all your friends and instantly it turns into Party Mode. This feature allows all attendees to upload photos to the event which then threads them all together for everyone to see.
Google Hangouts – Remember the days of video conferencing or webcam chats? How difficult was it to get more than two people in on the event? Well Google+ now allows live streaming events to be hosted online and joined by others and/or watched by everyone. From a business standpoint, this allows much more integration between employees and clients.

Communities and Pages – Google+ offers users the ability to create pages for their businesses just like Facebook as well as starting their own communities like Facebook groups. The difference is that the integration is much tighter with Google+ and everything is instantly linked to search results related to your content. On Facebook, you might have to pay for advertising to get similar results.
Future proof – Google+ is banking on long term goals with product integration and it starts with Google search. With the rise of micro-blogging and the sharing of content all over the internet, the power of Google search can only help get that content to the people. As a blogger myself, Google+ has even allowed my search results to appear next to my name and a photo to help make them stand out among the competition.

It seems that there isn’t much if anything that Google+ can’t do that Facebook can, so why would anyone not make the switch? Let’s take a look at some of the things that are holding me back…for now.

Reasons not to jump ship

Entrenchment – There’s no doubt that Facebook is vastly more widespread than Google+ is. In fact, “facebook” has almost become a ubiquitous term for social networking, much like “google” has become for finding things online. As a result, it’s much easier to find people on Facebook.
Vanity URLs – This might seem like such a small detail, but having the ability to tell people they can find your Facebook page by going to facebook.com/ledfrog is far more enticing than trying to tell people that they can find you on Google+ by going to plus.google.com/114683976907069457614. However, I should point out that Google has already started rolling out vanity URLs to verified celebrities and corporate brand pages. One such example is google.com/+hughjackman. The use of the little ‘+’ is also used to tag names in posts or search for people.
Integration – Although it’s also mentioned above as a pro, Facebook does have a leg up with website integration in terms of being able to login to external websites, but that’s all starting to change.

With time, Google+ has great potential to become much more powerful than Facebook due to Google’s vast amount of services and products they have connected together. Facebook has been described has being a social network, while Google is described as being a social layer that covers many of Google’s properties.

My Two Cents

In the end of all this debate, many people (including myself) will simply continue using both. I have to because all of my real-world friends are on Facebook and very few of them are on Google+. I also have a couple of Facebook pages that already have fans attached to them, so until I see the natural progression of Facebook users moving toward Google+, I don’t plan on deleting any accounts.

But just like the pioneers of Facebook did when they left MySpace all those years ago, I plan to start really pushing Google+ to my friends as well as posting more updates there than on Facebook. If my friends want to continue following me…well, they’ll have to literally follow me over to Google.

Facebook Stock – Buy, Sell or Wait?

May 22, 2012 · Brandon Hann

It feels like I haven’t written in a month! Oh that’s because I haven’t! Anyway, what better topic to re-open the flow of blog posts than one about Facebook?? As we all know, Facebook launched its IPO last week in an attempt to raise billions more than they were already worth (according to estimates), but from the very beginning, analysts were questioning the legitimacy of Facebook’s value. I mean seriously, how can you really gauge the value of an Internet company that doesn’t have a constant stream of revenue? Well, it seems the value of Facebook is relative to the amount of users actively on the site mixed with the real-world numbers of how much traffic and advertising Facebook is capable of receiving and displaying.

Continue reading →

The Problem With Twitter

December 16, 2010 · Brandon Hann

I’m going to be starting a total cleanup of my site soon and part of this process included the re-evaluation of my social networking skills–or lack thereof. Generally, I use Facebook and Twitter to publish some of my blog posts from two different blog sites as well as links to other things on the Internet I like. So far, it’s worked pretty well. People are responding well to the Facebook links, but less from the Twitter links.

I think that’s simply because I don’t use Twitter all that much and it’s really more of an automated “side-feature” of my site–sort of like the overlooked black sheep in my collection of tools. The reason for this was because Twitter has become a polluted haven of spammers and junkie advertisers. It got to the point that my phone was going off every couple of minutes with push notifications about some random person I was following and how they just found the Holy Grail of ebooks to sell me.

Twitter as a promotional tool

Naturally when people are given a device that allows others to see what they do, they will take advantage and begin using it to plaster stupid information all over the place–many, many times per day! This is precisely what happened to me.

I’m all for using new and unique tools for self-promotion, but where do you draw the line? It’s almost like every spammer and blogger out there has a Twitter account and are using it to pollute the Internet with more useless information. I can always tell the spammers apart because they are always offering the same products for sale and they will post 100 messages a day to do it.

Twitter as a friend follower

What a novel idea! Use Twitter for what it was designed for!! The idea of having a tool that allows your close friends to send out an update about what they are currently doing or where they are was a unique concept only a year ago, but now even the social networks like MySpace and Facebook have adopted these features right into your profile page.

So where before, you had to actually call your friend to find out what they were up to, now all you have to do is log into your favorite site. It’s actually starting to get a little creepy!

But for those of us who aren’t spending this time telling everyone that we just got to the store and now we’re shopping and now we’re leaving and now we’re going home and now we’re watching tv……we’re using Twitter as a way to get our information out to the world–or at least to those few people that are actually following us.

What makes us different is that we feel that we’re offering a bit more value to the community. When Twitter offered the ability to search tweets, everything changed. Now you can post your tweet out in the world hoping that someone is looking for keywords that you used.

This process gives people who like what you have to say the choice of hearing more of what you have to say simply by following you.

When too much is too much

The point of this post was to tell you this story. In an effort to recruit new followers, I was duped into the idea that if you follow somebody else, they are more likely to follow you. Well, it worked, but then I ended up with over 300 spammers that I was following–minus a few legitimate users.

I’m moving right along until one day, Twitter stops me from following any more people. They actually sent me an emailing explaining how Twitter works and what it was intended for and although I can’t recite the entire email, I remember something like, it’s near impossible to follow the streams from over a hundred or so people.

It got me thinking and they were right. I logged into my Twitter account and realized there was no way I could possible read that many tweets! Shortly after, I noticed that I wasn’t even using Twitter anymore and all those people were tweeting to a brick wall.

I decided to change all that! I went back into my account and unfollowed everyone I didn’t know and I re-enabled push notifications so I can get the updates I needed from the people I wanted to hear from. Now, I won’t follow anyone just because they follow me unless I’m interested in what they have to say.

It’s just my little way of fighting the spammers. As a promise to anyone who follows me, you will not get spammed. At best, you will get some insight to my drab little life and important updates to my sites. At worst, you’ll get a daily blog post link.

After all that, if you actually want to follow me, please do so!

Using Arkayne to bring focused traffic to your site

March 19, 2010 · Brandon Hann

I discovered a new, free service that you may have already noticed on my site, but didn’t even know where it was coming from. I’m talking about a new form of link building that actually makes sense. It’s called Arkayne and the two best things about it are: it’s free and it integrates with WordPress. Getting quality backlinks has never been easier!

I found them during my search for a plugin that would display related content on my blog posts to help link my site together because we all know how hard it is to keep our visitors on our site and if they don’t actually search for something, they may never see it! All I was looking for was a feature that allows me to write a blog post and have the plugin run around all my previous posts and display some links with related tags and/or keywords.

I can’t tell you how awesome this service is, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

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If you don’t have a few minutes to spare to finish the video, this is basically what it does. You have an account profile on their site that you use to promote your site plus your social networking account which include Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You then add some basic information about your site. Over on WordPress, you install the free plugin, insert your custom API code and let the magic begin!

In time, Arkayne will read through your entire site and essentially index your content on their site via links in your account. This makes you searchable to all Arkayne users. What will happen is people on the site will find your blog and if they deem it interesting and/or useful, they will click on Recommend and you basically have a “follower”. You, in turn, will also recommend blogs you find interesting and useful. This is a very useful tool for link building, which will get those coveted backlinks your site needs.

As time moves on, all of your posts will start to generate related links to other sites in the network and those sites who have recommended you will have your link show up on their posts. So just like other ranking sites, the more people that find your site useful, the more sites your links show up on.

Beyond that, you still get the feature I was originally looking for and that is this plugin will scour your site looking for related content that you’ve posted and place those links as well. You can even set how many links of each type are shown, from 1-5. You can see below that I currently have it set to show 3 of my links and 4 outside links.

The site appears to be running with a small amount of users so far (or least in the searches I did), but I have a lot of faith in this site due to it’s nature. Of course, only time will tell.

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