Google Plus Pinterest

2012 is a great year for social networking growth; at least it has been so far. This year innovative new social networking sites have appeared. Although some of them seem like Facebook clones, others are trying to reinvent the wheel.  At the end of 2011, Google+ and Pinterest both were experiencing an increase in traffic. These social networking sites seem to be more gender populated! Google+ favors men while Pinterest favors women. The next question is why? This article will discuss these two social networking websites and the marketing advantage these websites can give to and entrepreneur.

Google+ was in a field trial (normally Google do this via email invitation for users) finally opened up to the public on September 20, 2011. Although Google+ was not extremely popular we see at the end of 2011 Google+ starts to experience twenty million visitors. This is impressive in comparison to Pinterest’s history. Although even with these numbers Google plus continues to be underestimated. Google+ has mechanics similar to Facebook. Instead of “like” comments and statuses on Google+ you actually “+1”; also you can start “hangouts” which are essentially multiple webcam chat rooms. Once the numbers came back though Google+ showed that about 66% of their users were male; this is great news for anyone in marketing! Some businesses will want to still use Facebook as their primary internet advertising, but having a product or service that favors males over females will maximize the potential of Google+. Especially since one of Google+ has a new feature were someone can make your own “Page” very similar to Facebook. This also has showed signs of SEO potential for a business owner’s website!

Pinterest, on the other hand is a completely different story. Pinterest was started in March 2010; it is a two year old website that is just now becoming popular. This is, of course, vastly different than Google+’s history; at the end of 2011 Pinterest experienced eleven million visitors. Pinterest started out via email invitation much like Google+; however, Pinterest still uses this method. This may sound like a hassle but all a user has to do is enter the email address, and Pinterest will send an invite in one to two weeks. Pinterest uses a unique feature that most social networking sites do not use; they use a collection of pictures. As the saying goes “a picture is worth a thousand words” and that stands true with Pinterest. Allowing users to “pin” pictures found on Pinterest (depending on interests chosen when the account is created) to your own “board” (profile).  Also, another feature Pinterest cleverly uses is the ability to connect with a Facebook account. Unique marketing tool allows the user to post what they “pin” to their Facebook account. This creates a synthetic curiosity. People see that one of their friends “pinned” something on Pinterest; if they have never heard of it so they click on the link. Besides the fact that Pinterest seems to be a growing social network with potential it is also tailored towards women. Pinterest is populated with women and it is honestly difficult to find male users on the social network. Pinterest is great for business owners with a product that affects women. Businesses can make their own “pinboard” to post pictures of their product for the other users to see on Pinterest!

Pinterest and Google+ are two of the many social networking sites that business owners should be watching out for this year. Both of these social networking websites show potential for growth! Not only will they give the average business owner the chance to publicize their product, but it is also shown that these social networking sites can give businesses SEO advantages as well, especially since both of these websites have excellent page rank and alexa rank. What else is better than having a backlink on a Google owned website? Let us just hope that Google+ stays active and useful in comparison to Google’s other tools!

 

By Techwacky

Editor-in-Chef of TechWacky.com