Mountain View, Calif. — Google+ has a long way to go – more than 700 million users – before it catches up with Facebook, so it’s marketing department is digging through its bag of tricks to find the best ones to implement.
“This is a very small team but we have the benefit of Google’s existing marketing resources,” a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat. The giant is aiming to use some of its oldest marketing strategies to boost their social network through, what a source told VB, a lot of experimenting. “We expect new features to roll out on a frequent basis.”
Reporting a gain of 25 million unique global visitors with 10 million-plus users since its launch, the company has gained the title of fastest social network to reach numbers so quickly, according to comScore — surpassing MySpace, Twitter and Facebook’s growth in the same time period.
A source working for Google+ shared with VB some of the company’s plans for success, one of which includes marketing through data crunching— a strategy the company has believed in for years, according to former global team manager for Google Thomas Korte.
“Marketing at Google is extremely analytical: if you can’t measure it and show that it works, Larry [Page] will not approve it,” said Korte to VB. “He hates ‘marketing’ and the only way to convince him is with hard numbers.”
Korte went on to say that marketing is refined to a science rather than anything else. “They know what they are doing, and only work with the best. If they have something that works, they go crazy.”
Perhaps one of the biggest, and most recently controversial, ways Google+ markets the service is through limiting access to what it considers quality membership rather than quantity.
Having to answer last month to angry Google+ users who were suspended for not following their “common name” policy, Korte insists that keeping spammers out of Google+ will generate a better quality experience.
“There’s logic behind how many invitations are sent and who gets them,” he said. “They look at Twitter followers, how many people have in your address book. If you only have the coolest people, you keep the level up and it becomes an exclusive, desirable place to be.”
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Aerial photo of Lollapalooza 2010 by Jack Edinger, courtesy of Lollapalooza
