Google Plus is Finally Dead
Google has announced that it finally shutting down the consumer portion of Google Plus. This move has been predicted and expected for some time now but Google has as of yesterday made the news official.
Google Plus History
Google Plus was started in June of 2011 and by October of 2013 had 540 million users. This was the highpoint, however as the last thing anyone needed at that time (or the present time!) was another social media platform. Even though there were many users in a relatively short period of time there were signs that the app was not really needed. The amount of time that users spent on the app was much less than other social media and Google themselves has said that now, 90% of the apps user sessions are less than 5 seconds.
The section above tells why the shut down has been anticipated for some time now but another recent development has accelerated the timeline. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal announced that Google Plus had a bug that possibly exposed many users private data to hackers. After the announcement, Google decided to just shut the consumer portion down immediately and the whole thing down by August of 2019.
Conclusion
Because there was so little usage of Google Plus recently, there will not be a large change in anyone's social media marketing strategy. This information is useful however so if anyone had been posting to Google Plus, they now have one less thing to worry about and as every business owner knows, our time is valuable.