The Google + Project, Facebook and Social Media

Whether or not you believe that Google’s new Google+ project will one day grow up to become the David that slays the Goliath that is Facebook, one thing for certain is that the social media landscape is set to be changed forever, with many die-hard Google loyalists already making the switch to the new social media platform.

Its no secret that since the launch of Facebook and its rapid rise to popularity, Google has been progressively losing market share in both traffic volumes as well as to its core business of paid inclusion advertising (specifically, Adwords). With Facebook offering unprecedented targeting to its internet users’ interests, likes and social demographic (which Adwords is currently unable to do), Google realised quickly that in order to remain a competitor in this space it had to solidify its own social media foothold.

Now Google+ isn’t the first attempt by the company to break into social media, with its purchase of Orkut a few years back failing to achieve sufficient momentum and consequently falling by Facebook’s wayside. Since then however, Google appears to have learnt many lessons from their earlier failure and has made considerable headway in the launch of its own mobile operating system, Android – now a major competitor to the Apple’s extremely popular iPhone. So while Facebook is definitely the market leader in social media atm, the tight integration between Google’s well established search and content networks, it’s mobile computing OS (for phones, tablet PCs etc) and now Google+ as it’s social media offering, could potentially provide users with a much tighter experience in digital social networking that Facebook could hope to achieve on its own, giving Google+ now a big advantage over Facebook and consequently a much stronger chance of getting it right this time.

But whatever the outcome of this (as its still early days yet), we’re sure to see some exciting developments ahead. At very worst, a little healthy competition never hurt to encourage further innovation by both players