Within a few months, Google+ is expected to exceed 100 million members and you might be among those who decided to move to a new social networking haven. A couple of reasons come into mind: 1) everyone is leaving Facebook for G+ and to keep up with the norm you follow suit, 2) with the myriad of useless apps, pushy ads, and bullish privacy policies, the Facebook platform is, simply put, crap.
But the shift from Facebook to Google+ is not an easy thing to do. The leading social network is surely not just letting its 800 million users leave for a potential competitor. If you have been a Facebook member for so long, the process of transferring large amounts of your data from friends list, videos, and photos will be a tough one.
You don’t have to worry though; this guide will have everything you need to learn that, even with such a rigorous task, the transfer is going to be a success.
Friends
The most important data to retrieve is your contacts or friends list. After all, what’s the point of posting a profile online when nobody is checking them out? As of this writing, most of your friends probably would stay in Facebook a little longer before deciding to move as well. Nonetheless, we are not ignoring them — we’ll also convince them to switch by, for instance, sending out invites.
There is no direct way to import Facebook contacts to Google+, which can be attributed to the two companies being at bitter ends even to this day. What we need is an intermediary: a Yahoo! Mail account. There have been many browser extensions offering similar importing services but Facebook discovers them fast and terminates them pretty much easily.
If you don’t have a Yahoo account, go ahead and register one now — it’s actually better to use a new account so as not to clutter your main Yahoo account with Facebook litter. Alternately, you can also sign in using your Facebook credentials. Choosing the latter method will require you to give Yahoo permissions. Click Allow.
Complete the registration if needed and continue to the welcome page. Click the Contacts tab near the top, followed by clicking the Import Contacts button. Of the choices that will appear, choose Facebook and confirm sharing your contacts from the social network with Yahoo.
Wait as Yahoo retrieves the contacts information. You will be informed if the import is successful.
Proceed to Google Plus. Navigate to your Circles, click the Find People link (https://plus.google.com/circles/find), and choose Yahoo!
Allow Google to connect to your Yahoo! mail account. Once it’s done fetching the data, you can now sort your contacts into the appropriate circles.
Photos & Videos
Once again, a tertiary service is used as a go-between for transferring photos and videos from Facebook to Google+. Picasa, the image organizer the search giant acquired in 2004, will be used to upload the goods. Soon to be rebranded as Google Photos, its web storage service is actually the location of all your G+ images.
But first, we need to fetch our graphics and videos we uploaded to Facebook first. To do this, go to Account Settings.
Under the General tab, click the Download a copy (of your Facebook data) link. Confirm by clicking the Start My Archive button.
It may take some time, perhaps days, before Facebook finishes up compiling all your personal info, photos & videos included, into one archive. Even worse, the archive will not contain photos and videos you are tagged in that were uploaded by your friends.
There are a couple of services out there that can do the job a lot quicker. But we will have to advice you first to read their privacy policy and disclosure they attach to their service. TechDug will not be responsible for any misuse of your personal data for letting third-party services access your Facebook account. You have been warned.
Some noteworthy services are the following:
