So we have ourselves another social media platform. Google wanted in on the world of Social Media and thus, Google+ came into being.
Now, apart from having some trouble registering for Google+ (here I must thank Ben for his patient phonecall to me) I was perfectly open-minded and ready to see how it would work and be received. Mostly, I wanted to know if Google+ was going to be an effective tool for recruitment. These are my findings, so far:
Firstly, I don’t think there are enough people on Google+ for it to be used as a tool for recruitment yet– I know there are more and more people joining every day but there are also people getting bored with it every day. So far on my mini-feed, I haven’t seen too much quality content and any I have seen, I saw on Twitter first. Therefore, I am already guilty of not checking my Google+ too often and that’s only about 3 weeks in.
Having said that, I think that a few of the features lend themselves very well to potential recruitment and overall general business use. The ‘Circles’ for example, allow you to streamline your information to specific people and when sending out updates, your appropriately grouped people will see and receive what you want them to - this means less struggle for you to control what goes out to whom.
Leading on from this, the resulting control on privacy that this provides means you can quite easily keep the ‘social you’ and the ‘professional you’ apart, which can definitely become an issue on other Social Media sites such as Twitter or Facebook, making it difficult either for you to be recruited or for recruiters themselves.
And last week the something happened that perhaps others foresaw, but that I most certainly didn’t – the games appeared. Of course, straight away we all played on them and I lost a portion of time to enjoying myself with Poker or Bejewelled. It was all good fun but thinking about it afterwards with a non-Puzzle Island head, what it has mostly left me with is some confusion.
What is Google+ trying to be?
One moment, with the Circles and Hangouts, it seems to be veering towards a site that business can be easily conducted on and therefore is encouraging people to use it in this way. Then, you have games being introduced into the mix which is making it seem more heading towards a more relaxed, less serious site where people register to beat their friend’s high score and post pictures of them being crowned as the Diamond Dash victor. It seems to me that, at the moment, Google+ is trying to be all things to all people. With other social media sites, they all seem to specialise in a certain area; (though I realise I’m slightly generalising here) LinkedIn is for professionals to network for business whereas Facebook is geared towards people keeping up with their mates and messing around on games. So if Google+ can’t decide which audience it wants to appeal to, it will probably lose people as a result.
Saying this though, I am perfectly ready to see where Google+ is going, what it’s going to bring to the exciting world that is social media and how people will continue to receive it. Like with all social media, you have to be willing to put in the hard work and not expect super-quick results straight away. I look forward to watching what happens..
