Google+ brand pages are here!
Posted: Tuesday 08 November, 2011
Erica Whiteman
Yesterday, Google launched the long awaited pages for brands, enabling ‘non human entities’ to have a space on the social network Google+. Like personal Google+ pages, when users add a brand or company to their circles, it increases the brand or company’s follower count. These followers create and add to the brand community, in turn developing a deeper sense of loyalty and making the process a lot more social.
Creating a brand page is similar to creating a personal profile. When setting up a page, the user can select one of the five following categories: Local Business or Place, Product or Brand, Company/Institution or Organisation, Arts/Entertainment or Sports and Other. Pages for local businesses have an added option to include a map to the business’s location, contact details and hours of operation and integrate with Google Places.
Brands can get creative with the way the profile looks, such as using animated images in the header as Burberry has done. Similar to Facebook, brand pages can interact with followers, share photos, videos or links and even host Hangouts as a personal profile would. However, unlike Facebook pages, these can only be run by one administrator – the person who created the page initially - but a multiple administrator function is in the works for the future.
The launch is definitely a game changer for brands, giving them an alternative or addition to Facebook pages. So, with all of these features how can brands leverage Google+ features? One way is through ‘Circles’, which allows brands to organize their fan base, enabling them to target specific audiences or gather information for market research. However, fans must add the ‘Page’ to their ‘Circles’. Once they have done so, a brand page can add the fan to their circles, building the audience and fan-base. While is it still early days in terms of functionality, expect a number of features to be released by Google as it strives to offer brands a very real alternative or addition to Facebook.
Search is always at the forefront when it comes to Google. With Google+, it has developed Direct Connect, which allows users to search for specific pages by adding the ‘+’ in front of the query. If a user searches for ‘+Pepsi’, the Pepsi Google+ page will be the first shown. Google Instant must be active for this to work. Additionally, the +1 functionality means Google search is weighting social recommendations as a metric of content quality. As brand pages now start to become a part of users’ circles, they are likely to be considered influential - making the content and links they create and share extremely valuable when it comes to search.
Once a brand has created a Google+ page, they can add a G+ widget to their website, which creates a link back to their Google+ page. This gives Google information to establish search relevancy for the brand’s site and also creates eligibility for Direct Connect.
As it is still early days, it will be interesting to see how brands start using Google+ to interact with their fans, followers or customers to develop and increase brand loyalty.
