This is the week that had Myspace being sold off at $35 Million, Facebook being valued at $70 Billion and Google launching Google Plus. Veritable news of the past, the present and the possible future of social networking sites being announced within a span of seven days!!
Pundits are applauding Google’s social initiative (with Google +), they believe the company has finally got it right. Touring the new offering, one cannot help but wonder, if it is any different from what Facebook offers? While there are some features such as Circles in G+ that are better than Facebook’s groups, there is very little to substantially differentiate G+ from FB.
Google is not looking at creating the “Facebook killer” as a standalone offering; the company wants to leverage its ecosystem of web services that includes Search, Gmail, Google News, etc to create a one stop shop for internet users and Google plus is just its social networking offering. Whether Google will succeed in creating a seamless experience that consumers will flock to is a question that only time can answer.
Facebook’s IPO that is expected early next year will have the company valued upwards of $100 Billion , this will give the company all the resources it needs to acquire other companies to counter any threats that G+ will offer. There will be growth pangs that the company will have to negotiate, but FB has been planning for this for some time One move that it can make to effectively quash the G+ threat will be to find the holy grail of social networking and allow marketers the ability to leverage the vast quantities of information that it has, to precision target consumers in a safe, non intrusive but in a personalized way.
With social media marketing budgets on the rise the market is extremely lucrative. Google will make a very strong push in its attempt to have a piece of the action and FB will have to match it blow for blow. It is at the end a battle for FB to lose and not Google to win. The recent Myspace sale should serve as a stark reminder to FB as its possible future if it does not take the G+ threat seriously.
