In the wake of security concerns and low usage, Google announced in October last year that it intended to shut down the consumer version of its Google Plus social network.
The final closing date has now been confirmed as 2nd April 2019.
In their announcement, Google says:
On April 2nd, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages you created will be shut down and we will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in your Album Archive and your Google+ pages will also be deleted. You can download and save your content, just make sure to do so before April. Note that photos and videos backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted.Google announcement, January 30, 2019
The company says that the deletion process will take “a few months”, and it has already disabled the creation of new Google+ profiles, communities, pages and events.
Lessons learnt?
Although the platform wasn’t as heavily used as Facebook, the shutdown will no doubt still come as a blow to individuals who had invested time and energy building up circles of followers and communities on the platform.
They will now be scrambling to ensure their followers can continue to connect with them via other channels.
Which brings us to the most important lesson.
As useful as social media is, if you rely on it as a primary source of clients, then your business is fragile and out of your control.
You are effectively a digital sharecropper, farming on borrowed land, and totally at the whim and control of your digital landlord.
Every post you make, every review you collect, every like and share you gather… only exists because they allow it to exist.
And the risk is 1000x worse if you rely on just one social media site.
So it not only pays to spread your eggs over many social media baskets, but ALSO to make sure you have eggs in baskets you own and control too.
That’s why we created Trust Vega – and why we strongly recommend you take a serious look at using it in your own business.
It gives you the best of both worlds – letting you collect and display reviews you directly own – as well as encouraging your best clients to also leave feedback with the social media sites.
And the best part – our hassle-free followup system means you only need to ask them once, and you can potentially get client attracting reviews on Google, Facebook andyour own website.
If that sounds good, then why not get started below!
