Social You Should Know: Google+ for brands; Reactions to “InstaVid” and Facebook Reader

Been wondering if you should be wondering about Google+? We’ve got that and more in this week’s Social You Should Know.

Google+ Opportunities for Brands

Google+ continues to struggle to get significant engagement, but thinking about G+ as a traditional social network is probably not the right way to go. On our blog, we offer 4 ways that Google+ can help large brands, including improved content discovery, and a nice tie in to improved Google ad results. I’m watching this platform for two reasons: 1) It impacts SEO today, and will continue to do so; and 2) Google is clearly committed to this product for the long haul, which wasn’t true of Google Wave, Jaiku, Buzz and lots of other earlier experiments.

“InstaVid” Versus Vine

Last week’s big announcement was Instagram allowing 15 seconds. So far, the reaction to Instagram Video is mixed. My first effort at a video was “processing” for nearly 3 hours before it failed and disappeared. Others are concerned that the videos are just terrible. While there’s not much data on Instagram Video yet, we did see this week that the number of Vines doubled in the last two months, so that format is getting adopted. I personally think this is an important format, if we all take a breath and consider the right way to use it.

Facebook Reader Is Apparently Real, But Not RSS

Google Reader is going away shortly, and the digerati are all in a twirl, despite the fact that RSS readers never took on with the rest of the world. Rumors have been kicking around for the last couple of weeks that Facebook was going to join Feedly, AOL and others in building a replacement. Now, it’s out that Facebook is looking to launch a reader, but it won’t be based on RSS. It will be more like Flipbord, which is a visually appealing way of organize the most popular news in a topic based, of course, on shares/likes, etc. This is a logical place for Facebook to go, and it continues the trend of more traffic coming from social than search.

A special thank you to our June webcast guests: Anita Root and Josh Gunderson from Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group; and Jason Falls, VP of Digital Strategy for CafePress.com. If you missed out on either one of these you can catch up using the links below.

Webcast: Social Media Marketing Campaigns that Drive Revenue View Recording | Download Slides
Webcast: No Bulls#*t Social Media Revisited View Recording | Download Slides

That’s about it. Did anyone else catch that Walmart had an accidental F-bomb on their FB page last Sunday? They got away with it with almost no coverage of the mistake. How? They deleted it and pretended it never happened. Interesting.

It’s July 4th celebrations next week in the US and I’m taking the week off to enjoy with family. So we’ll skip next week’s update and I’ll be back to you the week of July 8. Enjoy!



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