Google Plus vs Facebook… A Photographer’s perspective

So I’ve recently (ie. the past year), found myself swinging between Facebook and Google+ as my main Social Media promotional tool.

Facebook

• Clearly a larger, more active social community.
• Just about everyone in the world has a profile and checks it more than they do emails or text messages. This creates a huge ‘potential’ audience. Winner!
• It has hashtags
• If someone ‘likes’ your stuff, all their chums see it… James Woodley likes this!
• ‘Boosted posts’ do actually seems to work. If your goal is to simply engage with as many people as possible, write/post something interesting, spend $5 boosting it and you have tens of thousands of potential viewers that you would not have had otherwise.

• Saturated with crap, the 21st Century version of ‘chain mail’, annoying complaining people and pictures of people’s lunch.
• The hashtags don’t work the way I want them to (maybe I’m doing something wrong).
• Did I mention the people complaining??
• To really get noticed, you have to pay.
• Way too commercial.
• It changes every 5.5 seconds.
• People seem to lose their minds if, heaven forbid, they get un-friended by you or anyone they know.
• NO, I DO NOT WANT TO PLAY CANDY CRUSH SAGA WITH YOU!!!!

Google+

Pros:

• Handles media like a dream. The galleries are just perfect for photographers to display their hard work.
• SEO is super duper optimized… Who uses Bing and or Yahoo! for searches nowadays anyway? :-/  What I mean by this, is that anyone entering a search in Google, will also see results from your G+ page, if you so wish.
• The whole ‘Circles’ thing makes it a whole lot easier to divide up your categories of contacts.
• The community seems to be more, what’s the word, civil? Maybe that’s just me. But it’s like the difference between the spectators of a cage fight and those of a polo match.
• It has hashtags that actually do what they’re meant to do.
• It’s not necessarily photographer related, but I love Google hangouts… You can put virtual hats on people, for crying out loud! 😀
• It will automatically tag people in pictures. This is hit and miss, but I’m sure it will improve with time.
• You can get in early for maximum exposure to those that actually matter… Like buying shares in Apple 20 years ago….. If only.

Cons:

• Arrived too late in the game, so everyone compared it to Facebook and immediately dismissed it.
• In my opinion, was not complete on the day of launch… I mean, no business pages?!? Huh???
• It can just be too damn fiddly sometimes.
• Too many options to wrap your head around.
• The separation of ‘Google local’ (formerly Google Places) & Google+ at the outset meant that if you didn’t do things right at the beginning, you’d end up with two separate profiles for your business… Bummer.
• The mobile app for the iPhone/iPad does not yet let you use the chat feature… Oh dear.
• Lack of ‘vanity’ URL’s unless you’re pre-selected… Why?? They can map the entire world in 360 degrees at street level, but I can’t have a URL for my page that resembles an earthly language?!?… Breath….. Breeaaatthh.