These updates should have a positive affect on business pages.
Google+ has given itself yet another makeover. The latest changes show that Google+ is still trying to join social media royalty status alongside Facebook & Twitter. Despite Google’s efforts and over 390 million active Google+ users, the social media platform hasn’t gained quite the momentum it had hoped. However, that doesn’t mean you should count Google+ out of the social media game. The company announced 41 new features in May at the Google developer conference, which are expected to roll out gradually.
A New Layout
What you will notice immediately is the new two-column layout, which puts the focus on the content. The new Google+ is fully responsive and optimized for people who are visually impaired by optimizing the layout even when using extreme browser zoom. Also, with the new layout, businesses can take better advantage of the Google+ page design and features. Here are a few things you should know.
Google has seemingly adopted the timeline layout of Facebook and now users can view their profile page and feed in one, two or three columns. By default, multi-column view is activated on the Google+ home page, but it’s not good for small screens. The best is to condense the feed to a single column.
The text is also larger, making it easier to read and less strenuous on the eyes. While on the home screen, users can also choose to show posts from specific circles, rather than everyone from all their circles at once.
Hashtags
Twitter is the most known social platform for using hashtags and now Google+ is improving the scene. While users could include hashtags in posts with the old layout, their function was not completely clear or easy to use. With the new layout, users can browse posts that share a hashtag without leaving the profile they are currently on. The Google+ stream will also automatically add hashtags to posts, so that users can browse content by clicking on a post of a particular topic. By scanning posts and tagging it accordingly, Google+ will identify and rank relevant conversations based on assigned hashtags.
Hangouts
Google’s Instant Message client, also called Google Chat or GChat, is now under the mini-umbrella of Hangouts. It is now available across desktop and mobile and unifies Google Talk, Google+ Messenger and the old Hangout video chat service. You will also be able to find Hangouts more easily with hashtags.
One very special feature of the new Hangouts is the conversation history. If you ever have an important meeting or conversation via Google+ hangouts, you can now go back and re-watch your hangout. This feature is easy to turn off if you wish, but it is the one thing so many are excited about.
New G+ Sidebar
The new sidebar is beautiful and clean. It is designed to simplify navigation through Google+ and has an auto hide feature.
Better Photos
Beyond simple cropping and filtering, there are now options that help you enhance the lighting of your photos, find the best photos of the bunch, create a collage, animate a series of similar images into a gif-like creation and more. New photos are automatically enhanced; if you do not want this done, all you have to do is uncheck the option “Automatically enhance new photos” under settings. In addition, pictures on the feed are bigger and the font size seems larger.
These updates should have a positive affect on business pages since most of the changes are focused on making Google+ easier to use and understand. You can read Google’s official announcement here to see all the changes.
What do you think of the Google+ changes?
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