Google+

Google+ is their attempt at social media networking and the user interface is very easy to understand and use to search and explore new communities from. It's interesting in that I'm an avid Google tools user including Gmail, Drive, Sheets, Slides and Docs mostly but I've never had a compelling reason to use Google+ more than I do. I've looked into it multiple times and considered the possible use personally and also for business and it's simply never had a viable reason to use every day like their other tools. Yet I was just on it and bumped into a great reason to go on. I immediately followed a stream by a gentleman who creates a new digital painting in Photoshop and releases it on Google+ each day and they're great. I've been passionate about digital painting for a couple of months now and just soak up anything I can learn from experts and also truly appreciate looking at cool art. So this could be a very compelling reason to come back to Google+ not only to follow this gentleman's artwork but also to see if there are daily streams offering this much value. It's also a strong social media factor in current best search engine optimization practices.

I appreciate the minimalist approach but also find myself wanting a bit more extensibility in my profile settings. I'm interested in streaming my art as well so what I'll look into is what percentage of people, artists or otherwise, post the same content on Google+ exclusively, versus on multiple social media networks. If that latter is the case, I'll probably end up following the daily art stream I've connected to mentioned above on another social platform which I use most often. I like the idea of Google+ having a unique reason to visit it such as a viewing something new daily such as a work of art, or a quote, something educational in various niches. In order to make it more unique than it currently is; for example Vine has their short video format which makes it unique, Twitter has their 140 character Tweets, Facebook was the first to feel personal and now has video that plays with no audio as you scroll down their page, Pinterest and Instagram have personalized boards which you can customize. SnapChat also has a well defined USP. What does Google+ have? You can look at all sorts of multimedia and such which is great, but perhaps it lacks that one element that seems to make some social media networks much more popular than others. Google+ seems to exist because Google exists and has a lot of traffic. I would want to use it in my everyday activities but currently haven't defined my reason to do so other than to help search engine optimization rankings.

I suppose Google+ seems to be all about community. That is the conclusion I've reached by writing this review. I've been expecting to use it for personal reasons such as I do with Facebook to communicate with family and friends but it has just not been adopted across my circle of family and friends like Facebook has. Next, I thought about how to use it for business purposes because there are a good number of connections and networking possibilities available from your dashboard. There are even emails available last time I looked. Not everyone made them public but a good percentage in one of my searches had and that surprised me considering the spam prevention measures taken by their Gmail software. But the adoption of businesses actively using the platform to communicate with and propose products and services to is low and so it doesn't serve you well to do prospecting or lead generation on Google+ because the response rate is very low. But I also I bumped into a new reason to explore Google+ and that is to discover new communities of people who share my hobby interests. And that to me holds promise and value that excites me because if I can learn from experts and appreciate their work via Google+ than guaranteed I will be returning to use it on a regular basis.