Social Network Competitive Strategy: Google Plus, Facebook and LinkedIn

October 3, 2011

Why Google Plus should be combined with LinkedIn

When Google Plus came storming into the Internet this summer, there was a lot of excitement and an initial rush of tech savvy, curious early adopters to populate the platform. I found Google Plus easy to use, well designed (with a very clean, functional interface), and it offered some really cool features. If it was meant to compete head on with Facebook, it certainly did that for early adopters like myself. I increasingly found myself enjoying the fresh feeling of Google Plus over the overcrowded social space that Facebook has become.

However, I still found Facebook to be inherently more social than Google Plus in many ways. Google Plus felt like it was developed by technology adopters, for technology adopters, full of cutting edge bells and whistles. But, at its core, I think Plus is a “tool”, while Facebook has now become a universal interface for person-to-person and person-to-group interactions. In fact, for all of its self-imposed terseness and rapid-fire forms of communications, I even find that conversations on Twitter are still more “natural” than they are in Google Plus.

Thus, I’ve come to the realization that Google Plus is not going to be a Facebook replacement, nor is it going to dramatically change the way we use social networks.

Google appears to be half-heartedly competing with Facebook (perhaps because the company can’t afford not to appear to do so), but it’s also trying to redefine or create a new social media experience for users. Seen in that perspective, Google Plus has not achieved its goals, despite its success in bringing new cool features to the table that many users love. Simply put, I think the competition is just too strong. Competing head on with Facebook requires Google to build a massive network that can rival the 700 million users Facebook has, and that’s not taking into account Facebook’s continued growth overseas.

So ultimately, in business strategy terms, what is the point of Google Plus? Can Google Plus, which is a great product overall, be of any strategic value to Google, or is it going to fall by the wayside, like many other efforts that Google has launched in the past and are now shuttering?

The way for Google to be able to compete with Facebook is to carve out a large enough segment of users, and provide unique values to those users, far beyond what Facebook or other social networks can provide.

That’s where LinkedIn comes in.

LinkedIn has become an amazing success by focusing on the business use of social networks, offering true “networking” tools that go beyond what any other networks can provide. Google, with the increasingly sophisticated and reliable Google Apps suite, can provide yet another set of compelling features that really create a lot of value for the business social network users.

Imagine how LinkedIn, with Google, could become an internal collaboration network with built-in support for collaborative tools like Google Docs, Google Chat, Google voice. That would effectively eclipse all “social software” tools out there. Being tightly integrated with LinkedIn would also mean that Google could actually ensure that content could be securely shared and disseminated within a corporate network, even if everything is actually stored in the cloud.

LinkedIn, with Google’s technology, could also become a true B2B network, connecting businesses in an extremely seamless and natural way by allowing their employees to communicate directly with each other. With the Apps Engine and the LinkedIn network of users, companies could really build cloud applications (internal or customer-facing), and roll them out on a massive scale. Moreover, this social network would be a lot less dependent on advertising revenue, buoyed by the clear opportunity to sell Google Apps, storage, security and payment services on that network.

All of those ideas are just examples that show how Google’s technology combined with LinkedIn’s network and user base could bring a massive disruption to the B2B world. By connecting their disparate technologies and connections, Google and LinkedIn could therefore create major value for businesses.

In addition, it’s not an area that Facebook would likely enter, at least in the near term. For now, Facebook has to cater to a much more diversified and broader set of customers with vastly different demands. So, a joint Google and LinkedIn effort would create an offering that is substantially differentiated from Facebook, as well as any other large scale social network out there. And given LinkedIn’s scale, it might even have the making of a game changer, with the potential to grow and capture a majority of businesses in the world, in one form or another.

Another compelling segment that Google could focus the Google Plus technology and experience on is the education market.

With the rise of new online education resources and paradigm like the Khan Academy, it is clear that the online education space will explode in the near term and social networking in an educational setting will be extremely important.

Instead of trying to provide a social network for students (like the original Facebook or the more recent MyYearBook.com), Google can create a social platform for teachers, students, and schools to interact, complementing the classroom experience. Google Plus already has some really powerful and appropriate features for education (such as Hangouts and circles) that can be readily translated into a superior educational experience for both teachers and students. Why not go there?

 

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.