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Google: The Company to Watch in Social Media
July 7, 2014 |Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Google has two social media offerings for manufacturers to consider in 2014: Google+ is the social network to watch this year. Seen for a long time as a poor cousin to Facebook, more marketers and salespeople are starting take a second look.
Almost no one, 8% of North American PCB manufacturers, uses Google+. For the most part, it's considered an add-on (“We put that post on LinkedIn. Put it on Google+ too”).
But Google+ has a few interesting things going for it:
- Google+ has over one billion members.
- Google+ has a larger percentage of engineers, IT, and technical people than the other social networks.
- Google+ is part of Google. A social network owned by, and integrated with, the largest search engine in the world.
- Google+ has Google Hangouts, which are kind of a hybrid between Skype and a seminar. Users can have video conference calls with up to nine people--an unlimited number of people are able to dial in and watch the nine people talk. Once the call is over, users can give it a name and post to YouTube for on-demand playback. Pretty cool stuff.
The second social media area is YouTube. YouTube is generally considered to be the largest search engine in the world after Google. According to David Moth of econsultancy.com, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The future of social media is video. Everyone prefers video to text. Short two to three minute videos that add value for the viewer will become more popular and more mainstream over the next12 to 18 months.
When I talked with PCB people whose companies are leading edge users of social media here is what they had to say about Google.
Keith Araujo, marketing manager, and Corbett Smith, marketing coordinator, at Epec Engineered Technologies when asked about their next big project say, “I am not sure if it is a big project, but taking better advantage of Google, both Google+ and YouTube.”
Judy Warner, director of Sales and Marketing at Transline Technology Inc., responded "Google+ is the social network to watch. It's taken a while, but they seem to be getting some traction. And I think there will be better use made of YouTube by our industry."
Google thinks Google+ and YouTube are important, and they are constantly looking for ways to integrate these two in with the rest of their product offering. You may not love them, but you sure can’t ignore them.Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media and especially LinkedIn. He has over 25 years experience in high-tech sales and management. He can be reached at brucej@practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.