Why did Google Plus end up as a failure?

At a time when virtually everyone has an account on some social network, many anticipated a success when Google announced its own network, called Google+ (Google Plus or G+).

When it was launched in 2011, we were all used to the company turning everything it touched into gold, so we could expect the same for its brand new social network, which was emerging as a competition for Facebook and Twitter.

However, Google+ never really convinced users and ended up ceasing to exist, becoming one of the technology company’s biggest failures.

Precisely, on November 7th, but in 2011, Google launched Google + Pages that allowed brands and companies to also join this social network, something like Facebook Pages.

However, even this strategy did not help this platform to take off. Therefore, nine years after this launch, we want to review the reasons why Google’s social network failed.

Harassment?

Everyone who had a Gmail account was on Google+, whether they wanted to or not. This was the only requirement to be part of the Google network, so no one (or almost no one) chose to open a profile on G+, so being there felt almost like an obligation.

At the same time, there was a sort of exhausting campaign by the company to force their star product on us, almost to the point of harassment, which ended up boring some users.

How does it work?

Another point that played against this platform is that no one ever really understood what it was for, or what you could do while being on this network.

The most important thing: What did it offer differently in relation to Facebook and Twitter? And there, the questions always remained unanswered.

Gmail

It’s interesting that, with millions of accounts created through Gmail, Google+ didn’t know how to make good use of this vast “portfolio” of clients and ended up disenchanting the users of its email service.

In this case, what could have been a big plus, ended up being a minus. A last-minute own-goal that they could never get rid of.

Unattractive

The people who entered G+ were not very sure what it was about; this was mainly due to an unclear presentation that did not care much about visual appeal either.

In short, it did not manage to seduce potential users.

In fact, a study conducted by ComScore found that people spent only three minutes on Google+. The problem is that those three minutes were per month, something very different from the 400 minutes spent on Facebook or the 960 minutes spent on Instagram.

Thus, in 2018, Google announced the temporary closure of its social network due to a serious security error in the access to private data of more than 500 thousand users.

It was too strong a blow from which it could never get up. In this way, Google’s failed social project ended up lowering its curtains definitively in March of last year, without shame or glory, and that had to have been shocking for a company used to adding only successes in its history.