Google Plus’ Tactics to Gain Adoption
While Google’s social network has been considered far from a victor against Facebook, their project has become by far Facebook’s most successful competitor. Much of this success has been a direct result of Google’s success in other networks; sites such as YouTube or GMail have given Google a very large audience to push their social network towards. The size of Google on the web has permitted them to get a foothold in a market already dominated by Facebook.
When analysing the spread of a new thing, such as a social networking site, the most important thing to consider is groups of friends. In general, the graph of people in the world is grouped into small clusters, where most of a person’s friendships are to other people within the cluster, and there are some other ties connecting out. When a user considers whether or not to use a new product, such as Google Plus, prospective users often consider how many of their friends are using the network. Since most of a person’s friends are within their cluster, if nobody in the cluster is using the service, it’s very hard to break in. There are two ways to deal with this: change the service such that users are more inclined to join even with few friends involved, or get a couple of users embedded in each group to switch. While the former is hard for Google, their presence on the web has made the latter very possible. By providing incentives for joining Plus in their other services such as YouTube, a few people in each group will break down and join the network. It doesn’t take many of these “seeds” to cause a full cascade within a cluster, so with these tactics Google has been able to gain at least a foothold in a market where other contenders have failed miserably.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-plus-is-outpacing-twitter-2013-5