Google Plus has finally launched it’s much anticipated pages for businesses!
In the past, a few of our bloggers have been quite cynical about whether Google plus can match Facebook as the number one social network and while that remains to be seen, Google plus can enhance your businesses’ social media experience thanks to several of the sites features which make communicating and organising your contacts easy.
Circles is, essentially, a friend list and allows you to organise your contacts. This is great for businesses as you may want to publicise something to once sector of your contacts (e.g. your employees) without bombarding the rest of your network with messages which they won’t be so interested in. Currently, Facebook offers no such feature.
Google+ also offers Hang Outs, which sort of acts like an online social club. Users can network, have video conferences and even watch youtube videos together from any part of the world.
Google+’s most famous feature is the +1 button which acts similarly to Facebook’s ‘like’ button. It enables users to recommend links, pages and features (it can also appear alongside your website in Google search results-which is great if you use Adwords).
Finally, it has Spark. Spark enables you to access information related to your interests. It’s a great place for us to read other blogs related to the media measurement industry which we wouldn’t necessarily have access to without Google+. It’s a perfect feature for those of us in fast paced industries who need to keep abreast with recent changes.
Of course, the experience isn’t completely rosy. Currently, Google+ has currently has less users than Facebook (and an unconfirmed number of inactive users) and at first glance it all looks a bit complicated with so many different features (you can see why Nikesh Arora described it as ‘a platform which allows us to bring social elements into all the services and products that we offer’.) However, We’ve been very vocal in encouraging people to join as many social networks as they can to engage with their consumer base and we wouldn’t be worth much salt if we weren’t willing to follow our own advice so we quickly joined up.
We’re still ironing out the kinks in our page (it was only set up yesterday!) but please feel free to add us to your circles.
Tags:Google+
