I guess you can say that the social networking war is officially on. Last week Facebook announced an assortment of new features including some really neat media integrations with startup streaming music company Spotify as well as a new Timeline profile feature. The new features are primarily aimed at getting users even more invested and tied into their ‘internet identities’.
Not to be outdone Google also had some tricks up its sleeve. As of last week Google+, Google’s newest rendition of the social network, is now open to the public. Not only is it open to the public but Google is also prominently displaying the signup button on their main search page.
To say that this marketing strategy worked is an understatement. Google+ now boasts over 43 million users which is an astounding 1269% growth rate. The site also garnered close to 15 million US visits last week. While that still pales in comparison to Facebook’s 800 million users, it is still impressive growth for an extremely new service. Most industry experts expect Google+ to be in the hundreds of millions of users before the end of the year which would be mere months after it was released. This is a feat that took Facebook several years to accomplish.
Marketing Case Study
The Google+ case study presents really interesting information on how to leverage an existing tool as well as how to curate customer clicks to create wanted results. Initially Google+ released invited to a select group of professionals in the tech industry. The next batch of invites where handed out more loosely but still were not openly available to anybody that wanted one. This was to present a sense of exclusivity to the early adopter mindset that is so prevalent in the tech community.
The initial game plan was great and resulted in early buzz but the first set of users was made up of primarily one demographic. The plan was not reaching the general public like they had hoped. With Facebook on the verge of announcing a new set of features they decide to release the network to the public. No invite code needed.
Not only did they release it to the public they also made the Google+ tab easily accessible on all of its other properties. The service it was most noticeable was on Google search. One you navigated to the page a large arrow would point you to the Google+ tab. This undoubtedly increased signup and helped to make the general public more aware of the service.
Conversion Rate Take Aways
The recent Google+ growth explosion is a great example of how you can influence your potential customers to do what you want on your site. Simply pointing to signup page or making a particular product stand out more than the rest can help influence users or make them more aware.
Google used visual cues to increase their user base by almost 1300%. While you may not have a globally used tool like Google Search to leverage, you can still implement similar tactics to use on your website to increase your conversions.
Corey Rabazinski is the co-founder of Orlando SEO company SEOhatch. Along with SEO the company also focuses on conversion rate optimization and social media marketing.
