That’s right, you’ve read the title correctly.
On October 8th, The Keyword (Google’s Official Blog) announced that Google+ is shutting down. Google recently revealed a security breach they discovered back in March 2018 contributed to the decision to phase out Google+.
Ben Smith, Vice President of Engineering over at Google had this to say about the internal review of the Google Plus security breach they kept hidden for months:
“The review did highlight the significant challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ that meets consumers’ expectations. Given these challenges and the very low usage of the consumer version of Google+, we decided to sunset the consumer version of Google+.”
Real reason for shutting down?
Google Plus simply didn’t work, period.
Google+ was designed to compete with other social media platforms by allowing you to share snippets of info and updates. However, it never caught on and is trailing far behind other leading social media networks and Google is clearly unwilling to invest more money into it at this point.
Google Posts is the place to be for ramping up your online reputation management and search engine optimization.
We saw this coming and started tackling this for our clients early on.
If you don’t know what Google Posts is all about and you’re working with an online marketing agency, fire them.
Learn about the value of Google Posts, HERE.