Video: What is Google+ ?

Hi, I’m Mike Essex, the online marketing manager at Koozai. Today, I’m going to walk you through Google+, the new social network announced by Google. I’m also going to tell you how it can rival Facebook, and what it does differently, and also some SEO benefits of potentially using the tool moving forward.

There are four core elements to Google+. These are indicated on the board behind me. So we’ll just run through each of these one by one.

Now the first one is Circles. Now, we’ve been talking about this since March, and it’s good to finally see that Google have actually followed through with it, because it’s actually a really good concept. The idea behind it is that you can have little mini-networks within your social network and only show content to them.

So for example now, you might have a LinkedIn account and a Facebook account. So you put business things on LinkedIn and personal things on Facebook. By using this, you can actually have different groups of people and assign them to a circle. You can say, “Well, these are my best friends, so I’m going to engage with them more often, but I don’t want those conversations to appear with all my friends or acquaintances that I used to know at school.”

By dividing people in this way, it actually helps you distribute content much easier. The SEO benefit of this is that people have now got better networks, and are potentially going to be more likely to share content because they don’t have to worry about what these kind of people would think about the content. They can only give relevant content out now.

Now, having more people talking about your content, it’s going to drive more people to your site. So obviously, the easier you can make it for people to share the content with their circles, the better benefit you’ll see of this.

The next one is Hangouts. This is just your basic video chat service. So when you login to Google+, you can see friends that are having video conversations and you can join in. Very similar to iChat, but the social networking aspect of it means that you can get involved in active conversations far easier. It’s also wider than having to just worry about people who own iChat or have a Mac.

Then we’ve got Huddles. Huddles is probably the least interesting feature in terms of you’ve already got Facebook chat, you’ve already got Skype, you’ve already got instant messaging on your phone. So, in terms of what it adds, it’s pretty limited. It’s just a long IM conversation that’s recorded across a group.

Google have probably included it just to make sure that they’ve at least got it in there as a similar service to their rivals. It’s certainly going to upset Microsoft, who’ve just spent so much money on Skype, now that Google are essentially giving away a rival service.

Last of all we’ve got Sparks. Sparks is the most interesting feature from a search perspective, and obviously with many people saying that Facebook is going to be used as a tool for search, it’s interesting to see that Google have hit back with their own version already.

Now what this will do, is you’ll actually get a search box within Google+, just like a typical Google search. That search is what people are talking about within your network, and then shows related topics as well. It’s really applying the power of Google to a social setting.

Also, Google +1 is going to play a big feature here. The more +1s you’ve got, the more likely your content’s going to be to show up, amongst other ranking factors of course. It gives people more reason to +1 your content if they find it through this network. From an SEO benefit, keep getting those +1s on your website content, because it’s clearly going to be important here.

So I hope that’s provided a good overview of the features of Google+. Sadly it’s impossible to get access to it at the moment without an invitation, but as we get access to the tool and learn more about it, we’ll be sure to post more video guides. To make sure you don’t miss those guides, be sure to subscribe to our channel, and also visit Koozai.com to learn more about what we do.

What do you think? If you have any suggestions about the video, or ideas for future topics please send them to pr@nullkoozai.com.