With over 20 million users and growing rapidly, brands looking toward social media to use in their marketing efforts should definitely start considering Google+ in their campaign. Currently, it seems that Google+ accounts are only being offered to people and personal brands, but Google has hinted that they will soon offer Google+ Pages for Businesses. Of course, there are still a couple of brands that has basically ignored this edict, and have created their accounts already in this new social media platform.
So what does this mean for your small business brand? Well, it’s another platform that you need to familiarize yourself – another profile to create and monitor, which can be really daunting when you think of the fact that you already have profiles in other social media sites that you’re already monitoring. But if Google+ really kicks off and gets a huge share of the millions of consumers all over the world, then you definitely can’t ignore it.
But even more so than just having another profile to trouble yourself with, Google+ may actually offer a lot more value to small business brands. As you know, many businesses have already taken advantage of their Google Places page, which is an excellent way to get started on location-based marketing. And if Google can effectively integrate your Google Places page with your small business’ profile in Google+, then you would have this incredible social media product that no other social media site has offered yet.
But that’s not all. Google+ also has a whole slew of features that can prove to be extremely valuable for both small and medium enterprises. With Circles, for example, you can easily create groups within your network, so you can offer targeted content to each of your groups. You will be able to customize deals and offers, as well as information and invitations to events.
Another thing that will be really helpful for small business brands is the fact that having a Google+ profile may offer Google SEO benefits. Since Google is planning to integrate it with most of its web offerings, your Google+ Page will probably be indexed by Google helping you achieve good rankings in the search engine. This is definitely an important part of your small business’ brand campaign, and a huge incentive for creating a profile in Google+.
Of course, since Google+ is technically not opening its doors to business brands yet, right now, these are mostly speculation. The question is whether Google can seamlessly integrate this latest social media platform with all their other offerings, giving users a fluidly wonderful site that is easy and convenient to manage. Because honestly, the more complicated a site is, the less people want to use it. But if anyone can do it, it’s a certainty that Google can.
And as always, the challenge here is getting more users to join the bandwagon and have a site that can compete with other social media platforms in terms of people in it who actively participate in discussions. After all, as a small business brand owner, you go where the people are. So if more and more people continue to flock to Google+, then you definitely need to be there as well.