This past June, immediately after Google launched it’s highly anticipated Google+ social network, internet savvy businesses like Ford, Dell and Mashable.com rushed to create pages for their brands.
Only to have them removed a few days later. Google’s announcement soon followed: “In the meantime, we ask you not to create a business profile using regular profiles on Google+. The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. (Christian Oestlien Ads project manager on Google+)
One hundred days later Google delivered on its promise. On November 7, 2011 Google+ announced the grand opening of Google+ Pages worldwide.
Google+ Pages allows businesses, brands, and organizations create their own page and establish a circle of like-minded people who enjoy the brand and want to talk about it. Not only does the page allow having a conversation with brand representatives in a way of personalized customer service, it also allows the group of followers to have a conversation with each other.
As Google+ puts it, when it talks about the customers: “…we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about—from local businesses to global brands… this means we can now hang out live with the local bike shop, or discuss our wardrobe with a favorite clothing line, or follow a band on tour. Google+ pages give life to everything we find in the real world. And by adding them to circles, we can create lasting bonds with the pages (and people) that matter most.” (Google’s blog)
Not only brands and businesses are involved. Google+ wants to enlarge the circle of users to local business, products, corporations, institutions, organizations, arts and entertainment, sports teams and more. They have been working with businesses since the launch in June to understand the needs and requirements of brand names. You can see the pages of these businesses already active:
- Dallas Cowboys
- Macy’s
- Pepsi
- Toyota
- Anderson Copper 360
- X games
- Zen Bikes
- The Muppets
Having pages for brands and businesses is nothing new, but Google+ has a few advantages over the competition:
- People can recommend the brand easily by pressing the +1 button, and start sharing immediately.
- A brand can have more than one page. A car manufacturer, for example, can have a page for each of its models.
- Although Facebook has over 500 million users, and Google+ has, so far, about 50 million, the biggest advantage of Google+ has to do with the billions of queries made every day on the search engine, most of them looking for businesses or services. Google will include Google+ pages in its search results.
- Direct connect – The easiest way to find a band you like to follow or a product has been amended as well. Typing the sign + before the query will take the searcher straight to the brand page. (Try it with + Angry Birds)
The official announcement on Google’s blog ends with these words: “With Google+, we strive to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. Today’s initial launch of Google+ Pages brings us a little bit closer, but we’ve still got lots of improvements planned, and miles to go before we sleep. So stay tuned.
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