17 May Social You Should Know: Google+ Updates and YouTube Live Streaming
With our company’s famous Mystery Trip kicking off Friday, here is this week’s Social You Should Know with a heavy emphasis on the folks at Google and some changes they rolled out this week.
Google+ Gets 41 Updates
Google has long said that they are in the G+ business for the long haul, and Wednesday’s announcement of 41 updates gave credence to that. Google+ now has an improved multi-column stream, improved photo editing and sharing, automatically added hashtags and more socially centered Google maps. They also announced a new way to get brand logos into search results, similar to the “author images” you may already see. Hangouts, a popular feature, will also become a standalone app. Given Google’s 66% market share in search, brands should pay attention to these changes. However, the network engagement is still low. The average visitor spent just under 7 minutes on G+, versus 404 minutes for Facebook. But, that is up from 3.3 minutes for G+ in February and Facebook is down from 429 minutes.
Google’s Sister, YouTube, Opens Live Streaming to Many Channels
YouTube Live, which was announced two years ago but only available to select channels, is now available to any YouTube channel with more than 1,000 subscribers, assuming you are in “good standing” with YouTube. Channels will now be able to stream their live content, including multiple camera angles, and YouTube will do the work to make it available across almost all devices. This new feature is worth experimenting with, particularly if you support live events or produce a lot of content.
More Brands Using Instagram, says New Research
According to research from Simply Measured, 67 of the Top 100 brands now have an Instagram presence. Just three, however, have over 1M followers (Nike, MTV and Starbucks). What’s interesting to me is that a higher percentage of these 100 brands have a presence on Pinterest (76 of 100), but the difference in follower count is dramatic. Those 76 brands have a combined 500,000 followers on Pinterest, while the 67 brands on Instagram have 7M followers.
We’ll be back from our Mystery Trip bright and early on Tuesday. Enjoy your weekend!
