The internet has been in a frenzy over Google + this past month. Initially, many people thought Google would have a hard time convincing Facebook users to join this new social network. But contrary to this initial belief, Google + already has “millions” of users, surpassing Twitter to become the fastest growing social network. This is fairly impressive considering it is still in its beta stage offering invite-only memberships. It is for this reason, as well as the reasons I will discuss below that I believe Google will win the social game against Facebook.
Historically, Google has always entered the market later but still managed to overtake their competitors. Google has defeated all the pioneer search engines since 1998 and then conquered the PPC market again with their Google Adwords program in 2001. Considering this, I think it’s highly likely they’ll conquer the social media industry soon.
Back in 1994 and 1995, Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo were among the 15 or so search engine companies involved in the search engine market. Google on the other hand, didn’t enter the market until a few years later when they launched the beta version of their search engine in 1998 and officially released it around 1999 and 2000. But that didn’t stop them from knocking down all the search engines that came before them and becoming the #1 search engine in the world in a very short span of time.
Then, not long after, Google went after the PPC market. Originally, Goto.com (Later changed to Overture and then bought by Yahoo!) was the first company to create the PPC concept back to 1999, along with a few other players. After Google launched Google Adwords during 2002, they were able to dominate the PPC market in just a few short years. Unlike, the Goto.com PPC model that was built on a simple PPC concept without any “marketing” logic, Google created a much better PPC program designed to help businesses with their “marketing” from the ground up. As Goto and Overture failed to convert its core PPC logic to match Adwords, it failed after being acquired by Yahoo!
Now, I’ll bring your attention back to Facebook. Facebook was built based on the early concepts of social networks. Currently, I think Facebook has little business value. Many people on Facebook are engaging in spam to build followers and likes. They are not really focus on building customer relationship, instead most of people are focus on “numbers” such as how many likes and how many followers they have. And even though people have 100′s or 1000′s of followers and likes on their pages, do they really benefit from this? I believe Google has discovered the weakness of Facebook and created the Google+ network with more business and marketing logic behind it. Google+ Circles will change social networking, and Google + will become another win for Google.
In many ways, Facebook is very similar to the former Goto.com or Overture, and Google+ is a mirror of Google Adwords. For example, the original PPC model created by Goto.com was quite simple; you created an account and bumped all your keywords to your account. That’s it. No matter what keywords you have, you put all your keywords in your same account. Google Adwords on the other hand, is grounded in “advertising and marketing” logic. It structures your advertising as “Campaigns”, “Adgroups” and “Keywords”. This simple change allowed Adwords to win the PPC war. Overture eventually implemented a “Category” structure but by then it has too far behind to even compete with Google Adwords.
The same thing will happen to Facebook. When more and more people figure out their Facebook account has less business value, is flooded with spammers and followers whom have no interest in their product or service, will they want to continue using it if there is another alternative social network to choose? The answer is obvious: Google will win the social networking war.
