- YouTube
- Snapchat
- Yelp
- Tumblr
Those are the top-10 social networking sites ranked by users in this year’s Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index.
The full list contains 20 brands, but even if we listed all of them, Google+ wouldn’t be there. The incidence level of people using Google+ as their primary (or even secondary) social media site was so low they didn’t make the list in 2018.
Google+ launched in 2011 as a challenge to Facebook, but you needed a special invitation to join. By the time they decided to allow anyone to join, it was pretty much too late. So much for being social.
Earlier this year Google+ exposed a half-million users’ private data, but they didn’t bother to inform them. So much for “do no evil,” Google’s unofficial motto, which they replaced it in their Code of Conduct with “do the right thing,” and later added the evil stuff back in.
BOTTOM LINE: Seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, Google is abandoning their consumer effort, shuttering the social media site.
At one point in time Google boasted Google+ had 300+ million members, but a lot of them weren’t active, just folks who clicked into the site by accident.
There’s no denying that Google is big. So big, they’ve apparently bought into the Field of Dreams credo, “If you build it, they will come.” To be successful, the real trick in social media needs to be, “if you build it, nurture it, engage them, entertain them, and value them, they may come and stay.”
Oh, and also do no evil.
Find out more about what makes customer loyalty happen and how Brand Keys metrics is able to predict future consumer behavior: brandkeys.com. Visit our YouTube channel to learn more about Brand Keys methodology, applications and case studies.
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