When Google+ first rolled out their change, we called it “Twitteresque“. After exploring it further for the last couple of weeks, we believe that it’s actually better than Pinterest in many ways… and worse.
One of the ways that it’s definitely better than Pinterest is in the display of large photos. The algorithm that drives the way that posts appear in your feed is beginning to reveal itself to be more complex than EdgeRank. It may have been that way all along but we never noticed because there wasn’t enough activity. In any case, it’s there now and we’re liking what we’re seeing.
First, you’ll see something here in this image screen captured from a friend’s feed that my post was prominently displayed. It took a while of scrolling to find the right image for this demonstration and it happened to be mine when we found it.
It’s not hard to understand. Google+ likes big posts. Apparently, it only works for horizontal orientation, though. We also saw an infographic that looked terrible because it was shrunk down.
In a lot of ways, Google+ is still a mystery. The community is emerging and flexing its preference muscles which is likely why they made the recent change. They love images much like Facebook but even more so. They highlight them more prominently than any of the networks and it appears to be a function of the algorithm to determine whether an image is displayed in the standard small format on the feed or if it gets the wide screen treatment. The key is to make sure that the images are large and relatively high resolution. That doesn’t mean that you should be posting huge pictures all the time, but if you can make sure that they’re at least 1000px wide, you should have a chance to get it seen better.
It isn’t just individuals, either. Business pages are getting the treatment as well:
My motto – if you’re going to be social, you might as well go big.