The Plus Side of Google+

You have Facebook and Pinterest but now you’re hearing talk about Google Plus for business. It seems like the list never ends. Should my company have this? Should my company spend the time?  The answer is ‘YES’.

Google Plus is useful for businesses because it allows for more direct and personal relationships. Information on Facebook and Twitter can get lost under multitudes of miscellaneous information, but Google Plus is dominated by quality content that’s both professional and informational. Not only that, but it allows brands to interact with other users and communities as a brand page, and the innovative use of circles allows users to divide their followers into different groups for a targeted messaging approach.

Communities:

The Communities feature allows brands to interact and engage with users because it encourages groups to form around particular interests, thus making it easy to find people who are interested in your business. Hangouts are also another exciting new feature that is only offered on Google Plus.

Google Hangouts:

The Hangouts feature lets users host group meetings, discussions, or demonstrations. It’s UNIQUE to this network. You can use this feature to organize panel discussions, answer consumer questions, host demonstrations, etc.  Although only 9 people can be in the Hangout, you can stream it live via YouTube to create a webinar.

SEO:

Another benefit of using Google Plus is the possibility to improve SEO. Research suggests sharing content on Google Plus has the potential to influence search rankings in significant ways:

• For Google Plus users, as long as you share blog posts with relevant, new (un-copied) information on a regular basis, you are that much more likely to be pushed up through the ranks of search results.
• Each post has the potential to send strong semantic signals to Google’s search algorithm. This not only helps the post itself to rank in Google’s search results, but potentially sends relevancy signals to a URL shared by the post.
• Sharing longer content and posts can seriously improve your SEO because Google sees and indexes these pages as it would blogs.

Ripples:

The Ripples feature allows you to see how your content is spreading, and therefore allows you to identify your most influential followers. With this, you can group your most influential re-posters and send them important content, valuable coupons and anything else you might want to spread quickly and immediately to as many readers as possible.

– Written by Diana Aguilar-Flores