Why 's Lisa Eadicicco's column on Google+ failed.


Why 's Lisa Eadicicco's column on Google+ failed.

The latest "Google+ is dead" article comes from an acquaintance of mine named Lisa Eadicicco (she's been on my show a few times, and also on TWiT): 

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-happened-to-google-plus-2015-4

The piece exists to explain why Google+ failed. In the article, Lisa makes 3 errors fatal to her argument, which add up to a grossly misleading article. 

Here are those errors: 

1. Lisa accepts without question the false idea that spinning photos out of Google+ means Google+ is failing. 

When Google properties like Google Play and YouTube were integrated into Google+, the tech press didn't give those events as evidence that Google+ was winning. 

Spinning out photos is a good thing, and doesn't affect Google+ at all. 

2. Lisa says something that's untrue: "Google+ never really caught on the same way social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn did."

In fact, Google+ is far bigger and has far more engagement than Twitter or Linkedin. 

The reason everyone believes the opposite is because of the sheer number of articles like this one -- regurgitating and repeating falsehoods without questioning the obvious flaws in reasoning that anyone can see. 

Let's talk about the Twitter comparison. 

Google+ engagement looks at one minor number: public posts. Private posts (the default mode) are NOT counted. Comments, which are replies, are NOT counted. 

Twitter engagement numbers count public posts, too (unlike on G+, the vast majority of Twitter posts are public). And replies to tweets -- the equivalent of a comment on Google+ -- are counted, too. 

A post with 20 replies on Google+ is counted as one post. 

A post with 20 replies on Twitter is counted as 21 posts. 

Twitter gets more than 20 times more "credit" in this example for engagement than Google+ does for the EXACT same conversation. 

That's why Twitter numbers are similar to Google+ numbers when in Face Google+ engagement is probably many times higher than Twitter. 


3. She equates employee grumbling with admission of failure.

Yes, I believe Google+ failed in the sense that it didn't make a dent in Facebook, which has got to have been a major goal. But Google+ did succeed in becoming the number-two social network in history in terms of engagement -- far more successful than the media's darling, Twitter. 


It's great that Lisa got sources on record giving us a tiny peek at what people might be saying inside Google. But the column goes off the rails by failing to question obviously false information that form the foundation of the article. 

(Pic props: http://www.thesocialmediahat.com/active-users )

Comments

  1. Owen SwartApril 27, 2015 at 5:08 AM

    They mentioned this on a recent episode of TWiG. It boils down to this: Google+'s main competition isn't Facebook, it's Twitter. 

    But Twitter is popular with celebrities, journalists, wannabe celebrities and wannabe journalists. While Google+ is more popular with regular people.

    So of course journalists think that Google+ is dead... they don't use it, and none of their (journalist) friends use it either. But the rest of us do... by the hundred million.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Friends+MeApril 27, 2015 at 6:04 AM

    Owen Swart exactly!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Denis G. LabrecqueMay 4, 2015 at 12:55 PM

    ...And G+ will only continue to grow because of its necessary association with many Google products, especially YouTube. Too bad so many accounts are dead, though.

    ReplyDelete

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