An invite showed up this week and I have been on Google Plus every night since. It is still tiny, mostly nerds and marketers and early people, but that is exactly the crowd I learn the most from.
The thing that got me is Circles. Instead of one big pile of “friends,” you sort people into groups and choose who sees what. It sounds small but it changes how you post. I put marketers in one circle, friends in another, and now I am not spamming my cousins with SEO talk.
Why I care as a marketer
Two reasons.
First, Google made this. Everyone in SEO is quietly betting that a Plus profile, a bunch of followers, and those little +1 buttons will feed into search somehow. Nobody can prove it yet. But when Google builds something and pushes it this hard, you pay attention.
Second, the conversations here are actually good right now. On Facebook I get baby photos. Here I get people arguing about attribution and posting long thoughtful things. It feels like Twitter and a blog had a baby.
What I am testing
I set up a page for one of my projects and I am posting the same content I put on Facebook, then watching what happens. Early answer: almost nobody is here yet, so reach is tiny. But the people who do engage are the right people.
I have no idea if Plus becomes the next big thing or a ghost town in two years. I am just not willing to be late if it wins. So I am in, poking at it, taking notes.
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