On November 17, Google announced some new structural changes to their social platform, Google+

Originally developed as a response to Mark Zuckerberg’s $245B Facebook, Google recently revealed on their blog that the company’s official social media platform, Google+, would further focus on two of their most successful features: Communities and Collections. Google’s Director of Streams, Eddie Kessler, explained the new developments along with company’s commitment to focus heavily on mobile platforms across iOS and Android on their recent blog post.

This is a strategic move that will distance itself further from Facebook. These are not changes that will necessarily make Google+ completely unique, however. Google Communities are a Reddit-like forum, which cultivates like interests among its 2.2 billion users in community forums – and averages 1.2 million new joins per day. Collections, which launched six months ago, is its’ Pinterest-like feature. The newly designed Google+ is slick and appealingly colorful—the changes focus on visual presentation over literary.

What changes will readers notice?

The new, fully redesigned Google+ puts Communities and Collections in the spotlight. Google is striving to make their Plus service much simpler, while optimizing with Android and iOS to make user experience more mobile friendly. Google’s engineers have drastically improved its web latency (how quickly the web app loads), which will reduce user’s data consumption and increase the experience by a landslide.

Current users will find the changes positive. Although, these changes happen to lack the berth of controls that Facebook offers. But Google+ isn’t looking to compete with Facebook—nor does it have to.

Google+ vs. Facebook

The more Google directs its Plus service away from Facebook, the more it may come to be successful. The company has already been quietly chipping away at it’s “dead, dismantled, or defeated,” service by separating its most successful features into standalone products. This will give users the choice in whether or not they want to use services such as Google Photos. With Communities and Collections, however, Google can take advantage of its biggest strength; it is the largest advertising company in the world and has the biggest data mine to collect from—itself. This means that the user experience (UX) from Google can be more tailored to the interest’s of the individual.

What could this mean for marketing and businesses?

The new structure Google+ offers could help businesses cull from the masses of people and better help find those who are in need of specific services. On the downside, there is the potential to lose masses of people who may not know they are interested in a company because of the company’s algorithm. The key factor to their future success lies on whether this new redesign proves to be compelling and useful to new and existing users. If Google can prove to make this more interesting, they may have a chance to bring Google Plus back and have a truly powerful social media platform.

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