It came as a rude shock to virtually everyone when Google announced that it will soon retire Google+, its social media platform. This sent cold shivers down the spines of a lot of people that have been doing some social media marketing on the platform.
Even though Google did not state the reason for the planned closure of the social media marketing platform that seems to be doing well, it is believed that this may have to do with the security issues the platform encountered in March. The issue led to the exposure of more than half a million accounts.
Google Plus
Google didn’t report it because it felt nobody gained considerable access into the exposed accounts on the platform. Unfortunately,Google was wrong on this. News later filtered into the air that well over 400 applications created by some digital marketing companies were able to gain access into some of the accounts pulling data like age, gender, occupation,email addresses, and usernames.
Although Google fixed the issue as soon as it was discovered, it was already too late and a lot of information had been pulled by numerous digital marketing companies. According to Google’s announcement,Google+ will be closed by August 2019. Since it was created to compete directly with Facebook, this may be good news for the latter.
However, it won’t be a total shutdown. Only the consumer version will be shut down while the corporate version will still continue to operate. Users of the platform in South Florida, West Palm Beach, and other parts of Florida have begun to get ready for the shutdown.
It is necessary to mention the fact that expectations are high that Google will replace the platform with a better one pretty soon. In fact, they may be working on it right now. May be the replacement will be ready before August 2019 when the consumer version of Google+ will be shut down.
There are several lessons to be learnt from this new development. Companies that have adopted only Google+ as its social media marketing platform will have problems now. The first lesson is that companies should market their products and services on multiple platforms.
Secondly, the security breach that occurred on Google+ in March is an indication that no platform is 100% secure. Remember, saying that Google+ will be shut down because of the security issue it encountered, is a speculation. However, if the speculation is true, it could mean that the security breach was much more than what Google thought and it is just a matter of time before the truth is blown out just like the Facebook – Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The point is, if you have registered on Google+ before March, chances are high that your accounts could be among the ones that have been compromised. As a response, you should change all that can be changed.
