Startup Guides > The Choice: Google+ Vs. Facebook

Google+ (defunct) was a nice social network that was quite different from Facebook in many ways but it was all the rage when it came out and people were waiting for e-mail invites to join the network. The initial buzz has been over for quite a while, and now it is time to really see if Google+ could have overtaken Facebook at some point to become a more popular and larger social network.

Are the Numbers Important?

It was thought that at some point in the future the numbers would take Google+ over Facebook, but that never happened. There were a lot of people who used both Google+ and Facebook but did not essentially keep up with their accounts and post on a regular basis.

Facebook has been the hub for people finding their old school and college friends, while Google+ appeared to be the site where people joined the friends that they already knew and probably were in touch with on a regular basis. This paradigm is something to take count of when looking at the number of users; however, that really doesn't mean much in the scenario if people are not keeping up with their accounts on regular basis.


What Do The Sites Offer?

Let's analyze the features of these sites, so that we can figure out why Facebook was the favorite of social media marketing professionals. Facebook came out with their Messenger and Messenger app to keep people in touch, and then Google came out with their own Messenger for Google+. Then, they came up with the Hangouts app and function that allowed people to do video calls just like they were doing on Skype or FaceTime, and later it added the chat feature in Hangouts as well. Google+ Hangout allowed you to video chat with a number of people at the same time, whereas, Facebook had a limitation in this regard. The thing about Google was that it was always ahead of Facebook in terms of innovating products for the reason that Google, the company as a whole, was working on a lot of more platforms than Facebook.

Facebook focused only on being a social network. They put all of their resources into ensuring that their network became more user-friendly and more accessible. Google, on the other hand, had all of their other resources that they could swarm into Google+ so that they could make the whole experience at Google+ a better experience for the end user.

But, the problem was that Google+ was still not as good an experience as Facebook. This was generally because of how Google constructed their social network. And mostly because of the fact that you needed to have a gmail account to use this feature, whereas Facebook allowed you to sign up and use all the features with any email ID. In case of Google many people didn't want to create another email ID for just having fun, as they were happy with their hotmail or yahoo email IDs.

No doubt, Facebook is incredibly addictive, but still a lot of people leave Facebook on a daily basis to streamline their lives, but Facebook gets even more signups everyday than the people leaving the network.

Another thing was that even if people were dissatisfied with Facebook they were rarely going to sign up on Google+ just for the sake of another new game in town. People were more connected on WhatsApp than Facebook, and Facebook ultimately acquired them. So, still the largest share of social networking was with Facebook.

In conclusion, Facebook was never close to being overtaken by the great Google social network. Given the features, numbers and other information, it was not likely to happen. However, both the sites were trying to churn out money from their respective networks and showing their users annoying ads. Ultimately, the dedicated social network with no other purpose other than connecting people was the winner in this battle.

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