Facebook Vs. Google+: Where Millennials Are (And Marketers Should Be)

The past few days have been big for social media; Google+ launched and Facebook announced video chat integration with Skype. Social media has become the lifeline for high school and college students; they plan their day-to-day lives via Facebook. To Millennials, they are what they post online. What do Google’s and Facebook’s latest moves mean for brands who want to use social media to connect with Millennials?

According to a recent Ypulse survey, nearly two thirds of Millennials say that a company or brand’s presence on social media shows they’re interested in people their age. What’s more, a majority think social media is a good place to find out what’s going on with a company or brand. Social media marketing sounds like a win-win, regardless of the platform.

Google+ has specifically asked brands and companies not to create presences on its new network. However, that doesn’t mean they’re not welcome. Google is going to beta test brand integration and consumer interaction on its new net, and then eventually release a business-optimized platform for companies and brands to establish a profile.

Google+ is still getting started, but it is very enticing to brands. It may not have 700 million users yet — in fact, Google is strictly limiting access and hasn’t even allowed all of those with invites to join the net for the past few days — but it’s full of early adopters. And its business-optimized edition will be linked up with other Google products that companies already use, such as Ad Words. But a presence on Google+ only reaches Google+ users, and Millennials may not be so quick to jump on board.

While older adults might be willing to migrate their social media activity to another network that doesn’t have Facebook’s history of privacy issues, that’s much less of a factor for Millennials. Older Millennials in particular are well aware that what they do online is public and that brands can use their activity to market to them.

What does draw Millennials’ attention and patronage is the next big thing, which could be Google+. But (as of yet) the new net doesn’t seem to offer much that isn’t already available on Facebook. In fact, what we’ve seen of Google+ follows one of two patterns so far. A few profiles are simply a replication of Facebook — friends’ profiles look the same, with the same status updates found on Facebook because both profiles have been tied to Twitter feeds. But the majority follows a second pattern; the profiles are blank, which makes us think people are so ingrained in the behavior of going to Facebook that they’re not using Google+. They have a Google+ account as a status symbol, but they don’t really use it. After all, if Millennials are what they post, they want their friends to see their updates, which means posting to Facebook where all of their friends are, rather than Google+ where just a few of their friends have managed to score accounts.

Granted, all this may change when Google opens its network with full access for everyone, but for the foreseeable future, Millennials will still be spending their social media time on Facebook because that’s where their friends are.