The BUZZ around Social Media

Social media has become very big in our day to day lives as social media use increases 82% worldwide. Not only is it becoming important in our personal life it is also becoming the norm for businesses across the world to engage in all the different forms of social media available. So much so that Facebook has actually created “pages” especially for business use.

The latest in the line of social media hubs has arrived from search engine giant Google and it’s called The Buzz. It was heavily criticised after the launch last week for the lack of privacy features but Facebook has been criticised in the past for security features and yet people still use the social networking site.

google buzz

By automatically connecting you with your gmail contacts, the Buzz provides the ability to share web links, photos, videos with those people that are important to you. You can also connect your Flickr, Twitter and other networking sites to your Buzz account allowing everything to be displayed in one place.

Google Buzz is also available via mobile technology and through any gmail account making it more accessible.  And with most people checking their email daily it is a way in which Buzz may attract large numbers of users. Facebook recently indicated that 25 percent of its users – or roughly 100 million – primarily access Facebook via mobile methods. By using your location, Google Buzz can also help to identify your updates. If you are in a nice restaurant having a meal for instance and you update your status with “having a lovely steak with…” you can actually pinpoint where you are eating. You can also read what other people have written about the places in close proximity to your current location.

With Google Buzz a user can also email people outside of Buzz within the same window which isn’t currently available on Twitter or Facebook.

Since the release, there have been 160,000 new posts per hour and with 38 million gmail users in the US alone (8 million more than the whole of Twitter), this may just be a reason for Twitter and Facebook to take Google Buzz seriously.