Google’s innovative and controversial new product Google Glass will be made available to the public later this year. With the launch date imminent, it’s time to start thinking about how such technology will impact the way consumers search for and interact with your content online.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the changes that might be in store for us after the arrival of the futuristic specs, and how you can start to prepare.
The End of Facebook?
As you might expect, Google have taken care to integrate its own social network, Google+, very closely into Glass. Early reviews have confirmed that most activities users can complete with Glass somehow involve contacts and circles from the social platform, and that this comes at the direct expense of other social giants like Facebook. If you were looking forward to using Glass to quickly share pictures with your Facebook friends, you might be disappointed - you’re going to have convert them to Google+ first.
While it’s still unclear how popular Glass will be, if adopters of the product are able to convince significant numbers of their friends to spend their time on Google+ instead of Facebook, it could spell the end of Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking empire, or at least the start of its downfall.
And if Google+ becomes the most popular social network, Google will have more and more content to integrate into its social graph, and the search results pages could start to look very different very quickly.
Has your property got to grips with Google+ yet, or do you still devote most of your time to chasing Shares and Likes on Facebook?
Search Gets Personal
Each time someone makes a search enquiry using Glass, they’re automatically logged into their Google account. This has a few marketing repercussions:
- Google’s ability to personalise search results will improve as they collect more of users’ personal information through Glass
- The search results page will include lots of content from Google+ because more and more people will join the social network if Glass use goes mainstream
- Thanks to its small, spectacle-sized screen, far fewer results can be displayed on the first page of SERPs than in traditional desktop or mobile search. Instead, highly relevant, personalised search results will be shown on small “info cards.” As a result, Google’s knowledge graph will become more important as the company strives to provide direct answers to search questions instead of simply providing users with a list of website links.
Again, are you working to build up your audience on Google+ so your property’s content appears higher in your guests personalised search results? Are you building connections with other businesses and important influencers on Google+ so their followers see your content in search results too?
Apps For Glass
New apps for Glass are popping up almost everyday, and thanks to the highly interactive nature of the new wearable technology, it’s likely that those that play up to its virtual-reality potential will prove to be most popular. All this could mean exciting things for marketers in the travel and tourism industry where creating a sense of place and experience is integral to driving conversions.
Have you thought about how you could use videos or augmented reality to enhance your content strategy? If so, you could be onto a winner if and when Glass takes off over the coming months and years.
How do you think Google Glass will change search? Let us know in the comments below!
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