Google+ has only been around for a couple of months and it’s already reached 25 million users. More and more people are thinking about ditching Facebook and adopting Google+ as their main social network – and maybe you’re among them! Moving to a new social website can be as much a pain as moving to a new flat, so if you’re considering switching to Google+, here are a few tips that can help you with the migration.
Security
First things first. Before starting the process, you need to download all the information on Facebook to your computer, account just in case. If you don’t know how to do it, check out my post on how to backup your Facebook account.
Importing photos
There are two ways to import your photos into Google+. One is using the Google Chrome extension Move your Photos, which accesses your Facebook account (after you authorize it, of course) and displays all your Facebook photo albums on a web page. You can then select the ones you want to import to Google+ and let the extension do the hard work for you.
The other way to import your photos to Google+ is using Picasa in combination with the backup copy you created before. Import the Facebook photo albums included in the backup into Picasa, and then enable the Sync to Web feature to upload and sync those images with your Picasa Web Album.
As soon as the images are on Picasa, they’ll be available on Google+.
Importing videos
Unfortunately, importing videos into Google+ is not an automated process. You can use the backup copy of your Facebook account again, only that this time you must select the videos you want to import and upload them manually from your Google+ account.
Importing contacts
Finally, importing contacts from Facebook to Google+ requires a few steps, but at least it’s not as painstaking as video. What it does require, however, is a Yahoo! email account. If you don’t have one (which you may do, if you have a Flickr account) you can create one by signing up with your Facebook login details.
In your Yahoo! address book, click the Facebook logo to import all your contacts from Facebook, and then use the Export tool in the Tools menu to export them again to CSV. New users though will have to wait 14 days until they can use the Export tool, which is kind of frustrating.
Once you’ve downloaded all your Facebook contacts from Yahoo!, go to the Circles section in your Google+ account, click the Upload address book link and select the CSV file you just created.
Your friends will appear on the list, ready to be added to your circles. And you’ll have successfully completed your migration from Facebook to Google+!
