What is happening to Google+?
On the 2nd of April, Google+ was officially closed as a social media platform after years of failing to compete with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. Google announced the planned closure of their platform shortly after it was revealed the company failed to disclose a major user data leak which affected many users who remained unaware about the issue. In this blog, I’ll go over the relevant parts of this closure and what you need to do.
What is being closed?
Google is only closing the Google+ service. That means your Google account as a whole is safe as well as all other related services, such as YouTube and Gmail. The only aspect that will be unavailable is the social media side of your Google account, which you probably never used anyway. Everything to do with your Google+ account, such as pages, photos and videos will also be deleted unless they are saved elsewhere such as Google Photos.
Why is it closing?
Google’s official reason for closing Google+ is due to the low usage of the platform and the cost of maintaining the service for such a small portion of users. Originally launched as Google’s social network to rival the likes of Facebook, the platform has never truly taken off and relied on forceful cross-platform accounts in order to boost the number of registered users. The userbase of Google+ has been widely inactive and even non-existent for most of its lifetime and Google has finally decided to lay the failed project to rest. The announcement also came after it was discovered that the platform was the subject of a data leak which was not disclosed for over 6 months and potentially affected up to 500,000 accounts.
Google’s original decision was to close the platform by August 2019, but the discovery of another data-related bug has led to the platform to close in April 2019 instead.
Will my business be affected?
Firstly, your business listing on Google My Business will not be affected at all since, like Gmail and YouTube, these are two separate services. However, there are still some changes you may need to make. For instance, if you have buttons for users to share your content on social media or links to your social media on your websites and blogs you’ll need to make sure you remove the option for Google+. Apart from small amendments like that, there isn’t really anything to do.
What do I need to do?
There’s a 99.9% chance that you absolutely don’t care about your Google+ profile, in which case you can feel free to sit back and relax as Google deletes your empty profile! However, if for some strange reason you actually used Google+ then you can download all your data from the platform which can be uploaded to any other social networks you’re on.