Category: Marketing

Early this month, Google announced it was launching “Pages” for Google+. This was a great announcement for businesses that are seeking out new marketing techniques to reach new customers, especially with all the success businesses, brands, and products have had from Facebook Pages.

Google Pages are very easy to set up. The entire process of creating a new page for your business, product, or brand takes about five minutes. If you have the free time, I definitely recommend setting one of these pages up because it is so simple and takes very little time.

Do not expect immediate sales, recognition, or a huge following for your Google+ pages. Even large public companies with widely popular products, are not getting a huge rush of people circling their page. SEO firm BrightEdge is reporting that 61 percent of the world’s top 100 brands have already created Google+ pages. According to Techcrunch.com, “Consumer brand stalwarts like Coke, McDonalds, and Verizon had only dozens of fans on Google,” (but have millions of Facebook fans). In fact, a review of Facebook and Google+ properties for all 100 brands showed a collective total of almost 300 million Facebook fans, compared to approximately 148,000 Google+ followers for these same brands.

Even with this huge disparity between Facebook and Google pages, it is still worthwile to set up a Google page. For starters: it’s free, and any extra advertising you can get for free is a worthwhile endeavor. Also, even though Google has not confirmed this yet, popularity on Google+ or even the existence of a page will surely be factored into Google’s algorithm for their search engine. Having a Google+ page will add legitimacy to your listing; being more popular than other companies in your field will show Google that consumers would rather see your listing before your competitor’s. This is speculation of course. Google is very secretive about their algorithm and what it does or does not pay attention to. However, it makes perfect sense that they would use their own social network to gauge credibility of companies and products. Also, the Plus 1 button for Google will play a role in SEO of the future.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Ryan Williams

Vic Gundotra, Google’s Senior Vice President of engineering, was a speaker at the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. He reportedly stated that brand pages will be arriving on the platform soon. Adding business pages will only add to the allure of using Google+ both for users and businesses.

This will be great not only for businesses wishing to advertise/promote with a page, but also for users who frequently connect with businesses on social networks such as Facebook. These sort of public platforms allow for both negative and positive reviews which help better the product.

Google+ was launched in June and now claims to have 40 million users. Ford was one of the first brands to try the network for marketing purposes. Over 21,000 people have the Ford test account in their circles. The new pages do not have anything exciting currently, but I’m sure they will be rolling out more updates in the future.

Currently, I am still using Facebook over Google+, but Google has impressed me over the last week or two, and I can’t wait to see what they roll out next.

http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/News/MostDiscussed/1099937/Google+-nears-brand-pages-launch

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Ryan Williams

There is a new social media outlet, Google+, that will surely be very popular. Google+ is still in Beta, but has pretty much opened the door to anyone with a will to join. They are still adding new features every day, and working out the kinks with existing features. Google has quite a following, is the number one all-time search engine, and every smart phone purchased these days gets set up with a free Gmail account. Google has the resources to reach a large number of people very quickly. The real question is will people feel compelled to switch to Google+.

Google has a “stream,” of information, much like the news feed on Facebook, to share information with your friends. However on Google+ you can only post on your own stream. If a friend makes a post, you can then comment on it. Happy Birthdays, and random posts of affection or appreciation are commonplace on Facebook “walls,” but at least for now, you won’t see them on Google+.

You can tag your friends in posts you make with Google+ by starting their name with an @ sign similar to Twitter’s method.

The reason Google+ does not have messaging and other services is most likely because they want to integrate their other products, such as Gmail, with it so they have more to share in other areas as well.

You can download all your contacts on Google+. You can also download your “profile” and “photos” and other information Google collects on all its applications. Facebook has a similar feature but does not collect as much information on you since it is just the social network aspect of it.

You can download contacts into your GMail account simply by clicking “contacts”. It’s also very easy to download your other data by going to any Google Page with the “Google+ bar.” (This is the new black bar at the top of the page.) Next, you need to click your name “John Smith,” then “Account Settings,” and then “Data Liberation.”

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Ryan Williams