We have created a band page on Google Plus, you can also check it out and add us to your circles via the slick Google Plus slider button at the top of the icon set on the right side of our website.
But why another social network? We think Google Plus could take off if Google can pull off YouTube integration in a smart way, and if Facebook screws things up with desperate measures to stop its stock price from hitting new lows. Yes, Facebook has about 1 billion users (including over 80 million fake ones), but remember how the once thriving social metropolis of MySpace had turned into a ghost town in about a year?
The Google Plus – YouTube integration is happening. Google was experimenting earlier this year with replacing the thumbs up/down buttons with the plus one button, and now it urges Google Plus users to rename their YouTube channels so that it matches their profiles. An option for the same YouTube channel re-branding for Google Plus pages is in the pipeline already. This integration will make sharing videos smoother than it is using other social networks (like Facebook). And most importantly, when you share a YouTube video on Facebook, and your fans click on the Facebook like button, they won’t help your video rank higher on YouTube. With Google Plus, they would.
Google Plus pages still lack basic features that bands need, most notably the option to include a music player on the page, set an easy-to-remember vanity URL and update the page via RSS feed. However, these features can be expected soon, while structurally Google Plus has some major advantages compared to Facebook. The possibility to group your contacts by creating circles gives you perfect control over what to share with who. On Google Plus we could create a circle for Hungarian fans and another for foreign ones, and then only Hungarians would get the Hungarian posts. We can’t do this on Facebook. You can also create circles for promoters, press people, groupies or whatever specific group of people you want to address with specific posts. And Google Plus pages also rank higher in Google searches.
Anyway, we’ll see what happens, but we wouldn’t mind Google Plus taking over as the leading social network. And we think if your band doesn’t have a Google Plus page yet, you should get one.