The battle for eyeballs and mind share in the social graph is revving up this week as Google, Facebook and Twitter launch a suite of competing tools to help brands get their message out across social networks. The central maxims of social marketing is that your friends probably like what you like and you trust a friend’s recommendation. This just went exponential with the Facebook subscribe button.
On the surface, the new Subscribe button is very similar to the Facebook “like” button for web pages. If you subscribe to a page, updates to that page will appear in your news feed. The killer new feature is that now your friends can subscribe to the site directly from your feed, they don’t even have to leave Facebook. This makes it far easier and quicker for trends to spread; this feature should lower the barrier to brand messages spreading virally.
Facebook subscribe is a direct throw down to Twitter, which is seen as the place to follow celebrities. Now it’s possible to subscribe to the pages of the glitterati directly. The subscribe button displays to logged in Facebook users all of their friends who have subscribed to the page they’re visiting, leveraging the power of peer pressure.
In response, Twitter has made brand pages more business friendly. Now you can feature your best tweets, and any embedded pictures and video links will be automatically open on your Twitter brand page. Keeping your tweet stream on message got a big overhaul with stream filtering. @ Replies and mentions can now be separated from your tweets, allowing companies to control the conversation. Additionally, logos and taglines are more prominent; this visual identity is crucial to marketing a brand.
Coca Cola's Twitter business page
Google’s power play comes from its massive base of contact address books. All Gmail and Android users trust Google with their contacts, with which the Googleplex hopes to build its Google+ social network quickly. Now, G+ posts will display along side emails in Gmail, and sorting email by circles will make important emails easier to find. Attachments, like images or videos, share to your Google+ circles directly from Gmail. Also, any changes to contact information in a Google profile will update in everyone’s address book.
With everyone rushing to claim the public sphere this will surely leave openings for new social networks that specialize in facilitating intimate communication and sharing between smaller circles of friends. Or, maybe Google+ will fill this niche nicely and outstrip Twitter and Facebook in the long run.
Agreed. A lot of niche communities evolving on specialized social networks. Was working with a company building an investment social network that will/should be launching soon.
As for Google+, I guess everyone is still waiting to find out how it will evolve and how exactly it will be used socially.