Bigger than Facebook and Twitter Combined??

Raise your hand if, once upon a time, you had a Myspace profile.

Ok I am guessing about 50% of you had one. Who still has one and uses it regularly? Not many of you right? My guess is that your Myspace profile became a thing of the past, just like your old bikini and college football jumper as soon as the funkier facebook came along and rocked our worlds.

I don’t remember really mourning the demise of myspace too much. I was too busy uploading pictures of my kittens and drunk friends to really give a damn. But now it seems there an even newer kid on the block….and it is the child of the internet giant itself, GOOGLE. This is important for you if you want to market content over the internet. In fact it’s very important so you need to listen up. Why?

Because Google + is more than just the latest social networking product to hit town. In fact Google + IS Google.

That Google+ and Google are one and the same thing really hit home at the end of last year when Google+ integrated itself with Google Docs, Chrome, Google Reader, Gmail, and YouTube. Google also redesigned its Search, News, Maps, Translate, Gmail and many other Google product headers to incorporate Google+. Long story short – all the various google applications have been integrated together and turned into features of Google +. And it is spreading like wildfire. At the end of 2011, the network had grown to an estimated 67 million users, which means it is quickly closing in on Twitter’s stated 100 million active users. This And there have been suggestions that there is more growth to come. For example, last week, Google announced Search, plus Your World, which is the merger of personalized search with social search, including the addition of relevant Google+ results.

And this is where Google’s critics have been up in arms as this means that now when you do a search, the results the results are more likely to bring you back to … Google. The main criticism here is that Google is not being true to it’s original democratic philosophy of bringing you the best quality content for your search, regardless of where it originated. Instead, they are keeping searchers ensnared in their own web.

Evil geniuses??? Maybe….. But, to be honest, I don’t really care. I think it is a great platform for sharing content for these reasons: By using the ‘circles’ structure, privacy is far less of an issue than it used to be. I can separate my followers into several groups – friends, family and collegues, for example and never the twain need ever meet. In other words, I can choose which of my sub-groups (circles) reads what. That means no more drunken Friday-nights-out-with-the-girls photos will be seen by my conservative aunt Bertha or my team leader at work. Likewise your jealous boy/girlfriend doesn’t need to see pictures of that cute personal trainer/skiing instructor/exotic dancer with his/her arm around you on your last trip away. ( I know you were only posing for the photo and nothing really happened but try explaining that to your partner). Likewise, I can create a professional network, perfect for small business owners or network marketers and not bore my friends to death with my latest offer – kind of like having Linked In and Facebook in the same application.

It’s integration with Google search. If you have a marketing consulting website, for example, and you integrate Google’s +1 button onto your website, when people +1 your content, that content will appear in Google search results with a higher ranking. In fact, according to Google’s algorithmic guru Amit Singhal, ‘ The social search algorithm, and the personal search algorithm, and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful.’ This means I don’t have to spend so much time resorting to cheap ‘SEO’ tricks. I can just focus on producing quality, original (remember the panda) content and post it onto Google +. Having the ‘Plus 1′ button on my website also gives me social proof and makes my website stand out to others.

So love it or hate it, it looks like we can’t really afford not to be on it. I say ‘circle me’ on Google + and lets face this giant together. But before you do, download my free e-book, ‘Uncovering Google Plus – the Next Social Media Monster’ to get all the info on how to rock on Google +. And don’t forget to click on the ‘+1′ button, alternatively, you can tweet and ‘like’ as well.