Again, a social media platform has a new design: This time it is Google+. What is new?
At first sight you will recognize the similarity to Pinterest (Pinterest has become one of THE visual social media platforms over the past years). The photo and video posts are very big and Google+ has paid attention to the latest design trends. This is a definite pro compared to the old design.
As regards branding and company/brand pages, the old Google+ design was not really a burner. The new design has even impaired here. Even though you can still see a cover photo of a Google+ profile, you will have to scroll up now to see it. When going on a Google+ page, you are automatically located at the beginning of the posts (beneath the cover photo). Google+ allows the user to instantly see the user bar showing the name of the company, but this is all you see at first sight, apart from the posts. Well, here we go again: Content is king and this is what social media is made for.
The next new thing are the so called „related hashtags“ that are similar to hashtags on Twitter. Use the # sign to tag key words which shall make finding relevant content on Google easier. Be careful: Even though it sounds tempting, don’t spam your posts with keywords, you don’t want to risk your users to have a bad user experience.
Even though the branding possibilities have impaired, I find the new design of Google+ very well done because content definitely is king – especially for social media platforms. If the similarity to Pinterest has a positive or negative impact on the image of Google+, is yet to be seen.