The Google+ network has been around for a couple of months and only a few weeks ago, opened its doors to the public. Yesterday Google announced the much awaited release of Google+ Pages on their blog. By making everyone wait a couple of months for the release of this feature, they have built up quite an anticipation from all the members to start building pages for their businesses on the Google+ network.
When the announcement was made yesterday, new Google+ Pages were created by many to test out this new feature. If you want to start creating a Google+ Page for your business, login to the network with your Google+ profile. It works similar to the way that Facebook Fan Pages work. Once you are logged in with your Google account, visit the “Create a Google+ Page” and choose a category for the page you want to create. Find the categories below.
Google+ Pages Categories
- Local business or place
- Product or Brand
- Company, Institution or Organization
- Arts, Entertainment or Sports
- Other
Once you have selected a category for your page, write a short description about the page, upload a logo, and add a status update. You can also add videos and photos to your page, but instructions to do that is a blog post on its own.
Only post status updates
At the moment, you can only post status updates and add people to circles from your Google+ Page, but all the exciting features will be launched soon and I believe that a couple of digital marketing (SEO) benefits will also be included. Maybe you will be able to +1 content as a company instead of a Google Profile. One of the nice features of Google+ Pages is Direct Connect and it allows others to add “+” in front of your company name in the search bar and then visit your Google+ Page directly from a drop down menu.
Have a look at the video below to see Google+ Pages in action directly from Google.
Well, I’m very interested in this. I have not used Google+ as much as I might, but went in today and did some updating. I will look into the new pages, though jeez… just one more thing to do in addition to ten thousand other things.
Sigh. Remind me… why do we do this blogging thing?
@Rick, you don’t have to do “ten thousand” things. If your targeted market is only on Facebook, focus then only on Facebook. If they are on Twitter, focus only on Twitter. You don’t have to join every new social media “channel” that opens up. Pick the ones that your targeted market spends their time on.
This is very helpful in the social media “run” but I can’t help but feel like a guinea pig. It pays to be the first but, is it really the right time to go into this one?
@Maybell, I would definitively give it a yes. The reason is that any way you look at it, Google is the number 1 channel that people use to find relevant information. With the addition of pages, I’m sure they are going to integrate the “page” stream on their search results. Bing is showing Facebook updates, Google will show their own page updates.