Google Plus Search

In a recent move to make Google search results more personal, Google started push content that is shared with you on Google+ and public information related to your search and mixing them into standard web search results. They are calling it Search, Plus Your World (SPYW). Basically, if you were to search for, say “funny cat pictures”, you would not only see expected results like I Can Haz Cheezburger, but also any posts from Google+ related to funny cat pictures in your personal search results, promoted to the top.

As Melissa Parrish points out in her blog post, there are several opportunities marketers can take advantage of. One is, depending on how many circles your brand has been added to, you will be able to track the traffic to your site through Google+. This should give you an understanding on how relevant your Google+ content is and how your brand is being searched. Another opportunity being the more circles your brand is in, the higher probability of engagement with your target audience. This engagement should lead to an increase in Google+ members, leading to new circle additions.

These opportunities do not come without their challenges. While there are around 60 million Google+ users, many of them (including me) are not actively using the service. I received an invite soon after the service launched, built my circles, and haven’t used it much since. My problem? I really haven’t been able to find a use for it yet. I like the ability to control which people can see my posts with circles (I believe Facebook has a similar feature with Groups), but what do I post to Google+ that I don’t post to Twitter or Facebook?

Marketers will not be able to dump random thoughts and links on Google+ and hope to gain traffic like they could in Twitter or Facebook. If they want their posts to show in their audience’s personal search results, they will have to be relevant to what is being searched and add value to the searchers results. This could be difficult to do when you are dealing with hundreds of thousands people you’ve added your brand to their circle.

While I can see most people ignoring this new feature in Google Search and leaving it turned on, I see many more people turning it off and keeping Google Search relevant and clean. I know that I will.

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