Facebook vs Google+

Can the two titans work together rather than against each other?

Last week, Google UK gave us a presentation explaining how Google+ can be beneficial to brands. 
Ok, I must admit, I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t come armed with AMAZING new features - they basically ran us through the features I already knew: the circles, hangouts (how very American), +1 button, etc.
It got me thinking though: what could be the role of Google+ for a brand? How would this compare to Facebook? And how can we maximise these two platforms and get them working together, rather than just duplicating activities?

Facebook we all know, of course. Everybody and their mums - quite literally - are on it, sharing mostly personal events from their lives. 
It’s also a mature channel with a wealth of tools made available for marketers, and all brands have pages on it (even those that probably shouldn’t). 
The arrival of API enabled us to get more creative and move from simpler “Like us to win stuff” mechanisms to complex apps and games, hopefully going viral (easier to brief than to deliver - memes have an annoying habit of not being created by social media specialists, but to just appear out of nowhere).
Of course some brands are more advanced in this domain than others, which are still dabbling in it; we also increasingly have to factor in how to deliver good customer service as users expect more one on one support - but overall, with strong analytics and acquisition tools, we know where we stand with Facebook, and we know who we’re speaking to.

Google+ is still a bit of an unknown quantity. It’s backed by the giant Google (and I may sound biased there, but I love Google so I can’t help it) so it has to be good, it must deliver value, somewhere, somehow... The truth is, however, that it’s still in its infancy - with all the negatives you can expect at this stage.
Many tech lovers got pulled into trying Google+ because of their Google addiction (do you remember the desperate pleas of “Anyone has a Google+ invites?!” which some people handed out magnanimously, 5 at a time?) but we still struggle to find its use, even on a personal basis. 
In the Google presentation I attended, we were asked how many of us had a Google+ account. Ten of the fifteen marketers present raised their hands. Then the Google lady asked “How many of you post more than once a week?”. No hand raised. I suspect than even if she’d asked how many of us posted at least once a week, the result would’ve been the same. And bear in mind this was amongst marketers interested in this channel as we had requested the meeting...
If we struggled to find a personal use to Google+, it was no wonder branded pages, launched in November 2011, were not immensely popular. The lack of analytics, no information on users, API conspicuously absent, no ad-serving do not help with this perception either.

So where does this leave us, keen marketers willing to experiment?
It doesn’t make sense to just duplicate activities across these two platforms. As I said, there are no apps on Google+ at the moment, but even when they will eventually be launched, they’re not likely to be simply transferable from one to another, and therefore this would also duplicate costs.
My gut feel is - these two platforms have very different target audiences. 
I cannot cross check this against any data (user data on G+ is not available yet), but I believe that users here are possibly a bit more upmarket. More educated, with the will to share not just what they ate for dinner, but rich content generating intelligent discussions with other like-minded people. They’re also - at least for now - more interested in new technologies.
We could therefore imagine segmenting activities between the two platforms in order to reach different audiences; using Facebook to reach a mass market and launch activities targeting greater numbers. Whilst G+ could enable us to have more qualitative engagement with a more mature audience.
Google+ could also prove a great tool for social customer service (hangouts are a bit restrictive at the moment, but they should evolve), and also potentially a new way to blog and develop a community... 

In short this is not straightforward yet, but G+ has a lot of potential and we should definitely start factoring it in the social media strategy. 
We’re at the beginning of something very exciting. Let’s get experimenting!