Last week, Facebook introduced some new changes on their social networking site. A few days later, Google+ made their social media accounts available to the general public. Could this be the start of a real social media battle?

Even though Google have denied that they are in direct competition with Facebook, everyone who has both these social networking accounts can see how similar they are to each other and how there’s always going to be some rivalry (let’s not forget Facebook’s association with Bing instead of Google).

Last week, Mashable ran a poll and just fewer than 35% of the 5,346 people who voted said that they hated the new Facebook! People also vented their anger and confusion using Twitter which then saw #NewFacebook trending.

However, we all know, from past Facebook changes that users will moan about the updates for a little while but then just accept the new changes and forget all about the old Facebook, allowing the social networking site to retain its users and continue growing.

Facebook has now reached over 800 million users whilst Google+ is also growing at a very quick rate, and has over 43 million users. Although the number is not as impressive as Facebook’s numbers just yet, we have to remember that Google+ is only 3 months old and has only this week become available to all people, rather than invite only.

With Google+ now open to the public, we are wondering if Google’s real time search would make a comeback after Twitter and Google failed to agree on terms so that Google could keep Twitter’s real time tweets in their results.

However, it seems that they are still at loggerheads with each other rather than working together. Bing renewed their contract with Twitter earlier this month to have real time results in their search engine, but who actually chooses Bing over Google when it’s not their default browser setting?

I have to admit that I’m one of the people that complained about the new Facebook changes and contributed to the discussion on Twitter, but still found myself using Facebook. Facebook is still the social network that most of my friends are using which makes using it much more interesting than Google+, where nothing is really going on in my circles yet. However, if I find that more people I know start using Google+ more I may get weaned off Facebook. It’s just what happened to my Myspace account, once everyone I cared about joined Facebook, my Myspace got deleted.

At the end of the day, people are going to choose and use a social networking site where they can actually be social with other people, rather than choose a networking site purely based on how great the user interface is.

We’re not sure if people are ready to ditch Facebook for Google+ just yet. Do you have a preferred social media account?

This week, Matthew Oxley, Gravytrain’s Head of Search, talked about the evolution of social search and Google+ over at Fourth Source.

At the moment social search is getting people in digital marketing excited, as it brings some great opportunity for users, as well as a number of prospects for advertisers.

However, the main area of discussion in this article is the possibility of Google+ overstepping the line and breaching people’s privacy and how so far, most social networks have done this by misjudging user’s needs for confidentiality. Matthew points out that, “Facebook is only just getting over their PR nightmares with regards to privacy, and Linkedin have more recently come under fire about their new social ads.”

Matthew explains that in day to day life, people like to keep personal information private, whether it’s a young lady reading her kindle to avoid stares from fellow commuters or an employee being coy about his whereabouts to avoid office gossip.

Matthew’s article considers the benefits of social search on Google+ but also illustrates a scenario to point out the negative points.

You can read the rest of Matthew’s views and the full article on Fourth Source.

This week, Gravytrain’s Account Manager, Matthew Read, spoke to UTalkMarketing.com about the social networking site Google+, and discussed how it can really compete with Facebook.

Since Google+ was launched two months ago, a staggering number of over twenty million users have set up an account; it took Facebook three years to gain the same number of users.

As Google+ pages for businesses aren’t available until the autumn, UTalkMarketing.com discusses what brands and businesses might want to get out of the social networking platform, once they’ve signed up.

One of the suggestions was having an online shopping experience on Google+. Facebook offers online shopping within Facebook pages, however businesses have struggled to measure how much of its new business can be attributed directly from consumer activity on the site. Matthew says “I would like to see the integration of [Google’s] shopping search results, so that businesses can have a direct point of sale on their Google+ profile and therefore accurately attribute sales from this medium”.

The article suggests that Google+ could challenge Facebook by touting itself as an effective new business tool.

You can read Matthew’s thoughts and the rest of the article on UTalkMarketing.com.

Since its launch, just a couple of weeks ago, Google+ has created a huge buzz in the online marketing world. With a report showing that the social networking site has already reached 10 million users in its 2 weeks test stage, it makes Google+ one of the fastest growing networks ever!

Google investors will also be happy as so far, revenue for Google is estimated to be up by 28% compared to the prior year. Investors polled by Thomson Reuters already expect the search engine to report net revenue of £4 billion.

Here at Gravytrain we managed to get invites to Google+ this week and have been getting to grips with the new social network. Like everyone else in the digital marketing community, a few of us are excited about the new social network and see its strong potential to rival Facebook, while others see Google+ as no competition to the current social media giants.

However, the main feature that most Google+ users seem to like is its privacy settings, which shows that the way we use social media could be changing.

While other social networking sites such as Facebook have seen innovative advances and an increase in popularity around the world, it doesn’t reflect how we actually interact with other people in real life. In real life, we don’t tend to share personal thoughts or content with everyone that we know. We’ll usually share certain things with certain people.

As mentioned in a previous post about Google+, the social network allows us to have different ‘circles’ of people where we can share different content with each group, whilst keeping other information private. Some people will use different social networks to connect with certain people, for example, Linkedin for work, Facebook for friends and family and Twitter for a mix of both. With Google+ and circles, it brings all these different groups into a platform that we can manage in one place, without embarrassment or worry over who sees what!

Arguably, Facebook does allow us to create lists where we can group different people, but to be honest, they are quite fiddly, weren’t really promoted and not clearly visible. Google enables us to have a social network that we can control ourselves, restrict the content that we receive and share information with certain groups, mirroring our online behaviour to how we socialise in real life.

Analysts however, have suggested that Google+ still has a long way to go before it matches Facebook’s popularity. Facebook announced last week that it had over 750 million users and is looking to enable video chats through its joint venture with Skype, which sounds quite similar to one of Google+’s video chat features, “Hangouts”. However, it’s still early days for Google+ and only time will tell whether the project will be successful.

So far, the increased popularity of Google+ shows that they are doing something right; it demonstrates that Google is driving towards success within social networking. Google+ could potentially be something that catches on with individuals and become very powerful, which other social networks should keep in mind.

Today I read an article in New Media Age wherein Danielle Long suggested that maybe Google has finally found a way to boost revenues from YouTube.

Having struck major content deals with the likes of MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment and CBS, YouTube will offer thousands of TV shows and full-length films for US users. These shows and films will be shown with ad breaks – effectively allowing TV ads to be shown to viewers watching online.

In addition to receiving revenue from advertisers, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has also indicated that in the future YouTube may utilise a subscription model saying: “We do expect, over time, to see micro payments and other forms of subscription to come.”

Monetisation is without a doubt the holy grail of those who own and run social networking sites – but the trouble is, it tends to sit somewhat uneasily with the users of these sites.

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in 2005. The site quickly grew and by July 2006 the site was receiving 100 million views per day. YouTube was acquired by Google in November 2006 for the princely sum of US$1.65 billion in Google stock.

Clearly Google saw revenue opportunities in YouTube, but as yet these have failed to come to fruition. Google does not provide figures for YouTube’s running costs, and YouTube’s revenues in 2007 were noted as ‘not material’ in a regulatory filing. Not surprising when you consider that YoutTube’s bandwidth costs alone were estimated at US$1 million per day in 2008.

The end game is – social networking costs the owners of the sites a great deal of money. However, the owners of these sites feel strongly that with such a large user base, the opportunities to monetise these sites via advertising should be great.

But in reality, it doesn’t seem to work like that. The advertising funded business model struggles as users complain about the ads interrupting their experience, and advertisers have complained that social networking users are not responsive.

As such, perhaps the subscription model which YouTube are considering could be the way forward – particularly if they offer advert-free subscriptions. As Danielle Long points out – the move by Google to introduce subscriptions to YouTube could be the tipping point for subscription models across other sites – which rather puts paid to the ideal of online content, and perhaps indeed social networking being free.

Image credit Tracy O