Have you been using Google+ for social media marketing? Or considering using it for SM?
Well, good news. You can stop thinking about it. Because it looks like Google has made the decision to shut down Google+ for consumers.
If you’ve used Facebook and Google+ over the last few years, you probably noticed that Google+ hasn’t been a thriving ecosystem for a while. Though from what I’ve read, it appears there were still some fairly active communities on the platform. Though it really hasn’t had the mainstream user base that Facebook has had and reportedly as many as 90% of Google+ accounts weren’t being actively used as far back a 2016. More recently after a major data breach, Google undertook a review of the way that customer information was being used and made available and seemingly out of that review, they decided that Google+ was not worth running (which seems to be a validation of those reports of inactivity).
So how does this affect you? Well, if you had a Google+ account, you’ll probably find that you can no longer log into it… though you may still be able to access the public profile. If you have unique content there (that’s not posted/or online elsewhere), you may want to consider copying this to another place so it continues to be available.
A lot of websites have a link to their Google+ account on their website and for those customers that do, I’d recommend changing this to a Google Business listing link, which is completely separate from Google+ and more closely connected to Google Places/Google maps.
Google Business (formerly Google Places) has become a central info repository for local businesses, and can include pictures related to your business, contact information, a description of your business and it’s services or products along with reviews left by your customers. As such it has become a much more relevant and useful content source than Google+.