I have just started doing a lot on Google+. Yes, it has its pros and cons as well as its pluses and minuses. Should you use Google+? Here is what I think.
(+) If you use Google+ a lot, it will do miracles for your analytics and site traffic. Something magical happens when you hit the 1000 mark on Google+. Your site traffic will spike according to what word on the street is.
(+) Google+’s feature of having circles is so much better than Twitter. You can arrange your followers by category, interest or industry. You can also segment your favorite accounts by creating a favorite or VIP circle. It is amazing the quality of the material in my VIP circle while my industry specific circles are filled with cyber trash. Oh well… At least I can separate them. On Twitter, you would have to create a separate account where you could follow your favorite accounts. On Twitter you can favorite a post, but not an account. At least not as of today — things could change!
(+) Google+ has great communities where you can post content. This feature is very similar to Linked In’s feature where you can have discussion groups or communities. Linked In often has much larger and better groups for business topics, but they tend to be a little too oriented towards self-promoting content and job search while Google+ gets better quality interactions in many cases.
(+) Google+ is a fast way to get clicks to your blog if you use communities and post interesting and relevant content. Twitter and Facebook do not make it easy to get clicks until you have a huge following. You don’t need to have a single follower on Google+ to get a ton of clicks, and those clicks will boost your SEO rankings for your site a lot if they are “quality” clicks.
(-) Google+ doesn’t have that many accounts compared to Twitter or Facebook. I’m not sure what the growth rate is, but Google is going to be promoting Google+ less from now on as well. Maybe they should find a new way to promote it instead of slowing down? Additionally, communities on Google+ tend to be very small except for a few photography and travel groups. In general, Google+ seems to be very much more geared towards visuals than Twitter or Facebook. Google+ allows taller photographs, while Twitter has a one size fits all on your profile page until someone clicks on it.
(-) Google+ makes has a multi-step process to see what your followers posted. If it is that difficult to see what they are publishing, it will be difficult for others to see what you are publishing too!
All in all, Google+ seems like one of the better social media sites out there. There are a few areas that they need improvement and over the next few years, they might make a few renovations and become #1 in the social media industry. We’ll have to wait and see.