by Francis Bea
The inclination these days is to throw up a blog for the sake of owning your own blog. Your label or peers may be egging you on because “everyone else is doing it,” but really what are the benefits? As I’ve mentioned in the article about why you should represent yourself on Pinterest, the majority of music blogs are Instagram images thrown into a collection of Tumblr posts, with a few sentences interspersed here and there. If you think about it, does your blog influence fans more than Tweeting photos from your last tour, or sharing on Facebook, Coldplay’s defiance against Spotify? Unless you’re monetizing your website, would you really have much to lose by moving from one platform to another?
For some time I’ve had my suspicions about Google’s strategies, fueled by the plethora of articles – that is until my suspicions were realized by the announcement of Google’s latest groundbreaking search and social hybridization known as “Search+,” an integration of the public data shared by those in your circles with their search engine. For SEO and social media professionals, the change is overwhelming, not to mention migraine inducing. But Google’s social search integration is a critical re-imagining of why you share and how you discover or acquire information. For the laymen, think of it as an open door for an increased chance for discovery.
Changes to Google search
The first change under personal search includes Google+ profiles (if they’ve signed up for a Google+ profile) in Google Instant’s search box.
When you search for a query on Google, what you’re graced with are the traditional SEO results interspersed with content from the individuals from your G+ profile that you’ve added to your circles.
In your social search results, on the far right column of your screen, you will notice “People and Pages,” a recommendation of Google Plus users and brands, who you can browse or follow, related to the query you’ve entered into the search box.
Of course if the aforementioned is too much social for you, you can always turn off “personal results” with a simple click.
How Search+ affects you and why you must maintain your Google+ profile
The likelihood of Google+ related content discovery, thanks to Google, has been enhanced exponentially. Any content publicly shared on your G+ page is fair game to be listed in the search results and will contend in ranking with other blogs and websites. How well your shared content ranks in the results page itself will likely be fueled by the number of +1s, volume of traffic, and degree of separation between yourself and the searcher, whose results you show up in.
For example, to highlight the importance of these changes, when searching for the query, “music,” a fan may decide to peruse the “People and Pages” related to “music” and click on Alisha Keys’s profile. Upon landing on a profile page, fans will typically read content and information that embodies the persona and artistry of a band in their bid to garner an understanding of the artist. That in itself should be reason enough to maintain your G+ profile. In a similar fashion, fans after hearing about a band in a magazine or radio will take to Google Plus to further their discovery of that band, with which Google inevitably displays the band’s Google Plus profile.
Note that now it’s even more important for your profile picture to be captivating. I personally have been compelled to “discover” musicians on a whim upon being lured by their album cover or profile picture.
What’s astounding is that the importance of your Twitter account as a destination find out about a band has decreased. In light of Twitter crying “antitrust” after the Google Plus integration with its search engine, Alex Macgillivray revealed an important point in the changes. A simple search for “@wwc”, which prior to the integration would have resulted in WWC’s Twitter page ranking number first, now appears below the fold.
What’s to be realized with Google+ is that the platform is targeting a new niche. Facebook, often seen as a close network (for most) of friends and family is befitting for networks of people withing a comfortable degree of separation. On the other hand, G+ is transforming into a hub where users, who many not be friends or even acquaintances, can follow, meet, video chat live and collaborate on the basis of common interests, at the expense of its search quality, thereby improving chances for bands to be discovered online, accidentally.
The weight of Google Plus’s integration should ring some alarms for some of you. So while Tumblr may be the best social network infused CMS out there, it falls far behind, in the frequency of content sharing and discovery, Google Plus’s newsfeed. After all, social networks are one of the leading reasons for content discovery.
With such tools that incentivize the use of Google+ in place, an inveterate movement toward a hybridization of blogging, combining microblogging with its longer form cousin, and self-promotion is inevitably, whether hated or loved, a necessity. Still not convinced? Just ask the high profile Google Plus “bloggers” including Kevin Rose of Milk and founder of Digg, Robert Scoble, of Rackspace, and Tom Anderson, founder of Myspace.
Francis Bea is a New York City based writer, PR person, and tech junkie who’s solving the music industry’s woes with his start-ups, Musefy.com and Proptone.com. You can find him on @francisybea and @musefy.
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