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Google made a lot of mistakes while launching its previous social networks- Google Wave and Google Buzz. Google Wave was not easy to use and Google Buzz… well, suffice to say that it’s not really buzzing.

Google tried to quickly grow Google Buzz by automatically enrolling everyone who has gmail account into this program. It backfired. People don’t want to be included in any group without giving prior consent. Just look at Facebook Groups. It’s one of the least popular features on Facebook so far.

As a result, there were a lot of negative reactions throughout blogosphere and social space about privacy invasion, the freedom of choice, etc. And though Google tried to rectify the situation, damage was already done. Some mistakes you could recover from, others are fatal. It looks like for Google Buzz quick non-volunteer enrollment was the latter.

It’s safe to say that Google learned its lessons. Its newest social network, Google+ is on a roll. There are many reasons why it’s growing so fast.
But in my opinion the most important are:

• Exclusivity
• Influence on SERPs rankings
• Google Circles

Let’s take a closer look at each factor that helped to skyrocket Google+ growth.

Google+ Exclusivity
Learning from Google Buzz mistake, when launching Google + Google decided to go an opposite direction –instead of inviting everyone, give this newest social network a sense of exclusivity, make sure people want to join.

You can become the member of Google+ only through private invitation. In other words, one of your friends should already be a part of this network, and should send you an invitation, otherwise you can’t get in. (Yes, sure, you can go to Google+ and ask for the invitation directly, but I am not sure how long will it take to actually receive this invitation. My guess is you would have to wait at least several months).

I applaud to whoever came up with this brilliant social media strategy, my hat is off to bright Google minds.
People were fighting to get an invitation, Google+ was featured everywhere, in every even slightly important blog or social network.

Not surprisingly, Google + grew to 20 million members in a record time.

Google+ Influences Google SERPs results
Though Google introduced its equivalent of Facebook “like” button (which is called “+1” button) a while ago it was not really that popular. Then Google made it abundantly clear that the number of “+1” you get for your posts actually affects your Google rankings. Google provided a channel to harvest those “+1” from your social buddies. Do you want to guess what is this channel called? Good guess. Yes, it’s a Google+.

The more posts (your own and from people you respect) you share and “+1”, the better would be your rankings on Google SERPs. There is only one little problem (or actually, it is a big one).

You have to manually go to Google+ in order to share your posts or the posts of your friends. There is no way to post from some other social network and get it automatically distributed to Google+ (or at least I haven’t found one). I don’t see any option to embed custom RSS feeds in the Google + either, hence no luck with distributing content directly from your blogs through RSS.

In comparison, I can post to blogs and get the content automatically distributed to Twitter, Facebook and hundreds of other social networks in a matter of seconds but Google+ demands a lot of extra time. And if you jump to Google+, you probably won’t have as much time to stay on Facebook either.

I seriously doubt that inability to embed custom RSS feeds in G+ sream is just Google’s oversight. More likely it’s a crucial part of Google strategy to get most tech-savvy social networkers from Facebook into G+. Which brings us to the last significant element of initial success for Google+:

Google Circles
Google recognized that Facebook’s friends structure is very rigid. Yes, you can add them to lists but this doesn’t give you the ability to effectively sort your social friends. In Google Circles, you can easily sort people based on any criteria – you can put friends in one circle, family members in another one, and your social friends in a third one. You can then be as granular as you want sorting those friends by their interests. And you can add them to more than 1 circle. For example, your social friend could also be your client – then place him in both circles.

And when sharing a post or image, you now can share it not with a whole group of your social friends, but with ones that you know for sure are interested in this topic. So you can send message to a very refined group who will be glad to receive it. Of course the ability to provide video conferences between the members of the circle doesn’t hurt either.
So do you choose Google+ and the ability to influence Google rankings through increased “+1” or Facebook, its 700 million members and the ability of mass-distribution through other social networks?

The decision is yours but obviously it will depend on your audience and your goals.
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Opening image from pvantees on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

Not long ago twitter introduced a new feature – ability to classify people you follow by categories. But instead of making pre-defined categories, they let users to create them, calling them “lists”.

I was invited to beta-test this feature before it was released to the general public, and share my feedback. Now I’m sharing my thoughts about twitter lists with you.

Categorization is very important for any established network, especially social network. Yet the correct dichotomy of complex category trees and the optimal definition of tree nodes are not trivial matters at all. So instead of making up artificial categories, twitter essentially created a social poll letting people “vote” for their favorite categories.

Each list (or category) created by individual twitter could count as one vote. So the more people create lists with the same name, the more weight this name will probably carry as the candidate for particular node definition.

Twitter harnesses the collective brain power of its users to build complete modern schema of social flow. All they need now is a relatively simple program to conduct statistic analysis of node’s relations and relevancy. Brilliant!

This is only one of possible applications for twitter lists.

Another application is also pertained to voting, but in different way. Before twitter introduced twitter lists, the only voting mechanism available on twitter was related to RTs (re-tweets). I discussed the actual role of twitter RTs in the previous article.

Yet, many social networks have at least 2 different voting modules. In Facebook, for example, you can “like” somebody’s post, you can write a comment, and you can become a fan of friend’s page or community, essentially voting for it, since all your friends see that you joined that micro-community.

So, with introduction of twitter lists, twitter created a second voting option. Twitter user can place up to 500 people on the list, and create up to 20 different lists. If you follow more than 10000 tweeple, you can easily miss the updates from tweeps that (in your opinion) have the most knowledgeable/interesting/provocative tweets on that topic of interest.

Twitter lists allow to tone-down all that noise and clutter of general twitter communications, and really follow the updates of people that you think are worthy of special attention.

How is this relevant to voting? Well, if tweeple placed someone on the list, they essentially voted for that person. They voted that s/he has something to say, and is valuable for the community.

The more people placed you on the list, the higher is your weight in the community.

I’m pretty sure that search engines will soon add this parameter to their authority calculation algorithms and will pay attention to it when defining the SERP rankings of a particular record (notice, I said record, not web page, since now there are many different formats of indexed information, and “page” can be applied to only a few of them) . Of course, this new parameter should only be used in combination with others.

Here is the third application for twitter lists. (This one could be short-lived since many SEO specialists will soon use it to their advantage, and probably abuse it to death).

For now, you can estimate the value of your own twitter account by looking at the number of lists that you’re in (not financial value, the value of your information.) It should not be estimated as the constant. Information-wise, the account listed on thousands of lists may be less valuable then the account listed on only 10 lists or so. When defining the information value of my different twitter accounts, I use the following formula. You should be listed on the number of lists equal or more than 0.1% of the number of your followers.

Hence, if you have 10000 followers, you should be listed at least on 10 lists. If you’re not, then your account probably doesn’t provide enough value for your followers. You’re not helping your community, and you should quickly do something about it.

Review your tweets. I personally hate useless “bathroom break”-kind of tweets. Yet maybe you’re a part of the community that likes them. Even if this is the case, low listing ratio signals that you might need to deviate from your current tweeting pattern.

Of course the three list applications mentioned above is only a tip of the iceberg. The main point of this article is not only to show you the usefulness of this new twitter feature, but also to demonstrate that for many new features in social networks there are possibly hundreds of possible applications that nobody thought of. Use those applications to promote your brand, establish your authority, and help your social network communities.

P.S. I hope you find this post useful for your SEO and social marketing. If you want more up-to date SEO and Social Media info, signup for Social Media Secrets Newsletter using the signup form at the top right part of this blog, or go to www.web-feed.com .