Google + Business Pages- The low down

From Google:

How Google+ pages and Google+ profiles can interact with one another

Pages can interact with other Google+ users who are in their circles much in the way that a Google+ profile owner would. As an owner of your Google+ page, you can:

• +1, comment on, and reshare people’s posts.
• Add people (who’ve already added you) and pages to circles.
• Start and join hangouts.
• Mention people in posts and comments (who’ve already added or mentioned you).
• Block and ignore people and pages.

If you’re worried about how deeply a page can interact with your Google+ profile, don’t be. Unless you show that you’re interested in a page by adding it to a circle or mentioning it, there’s very little that page can do to reach out to you. 

If you want to limit the ways in which a page can interact with you, you can remove the page from your circles, ignore the page, or block the page. And if the page is behaving abusively, you can report the page for abuse.

 

It looks like for now at least getting people to like your Google+ Page will be largely done from OUTSIDE of Google itself.

You can add mine to your circles here (although there isn’t anything on there yet – there WILL be VERY soon)

In Google+ you have the following categories to choose from very similar to Facebook:

local business/place,

Product/brand,

Company/institution/organization,

arts/entertainment/sports,

or other.

If you choose local Business / Place They immediately go and find your Google Place page to link into your Business page.

This is great for businesses with a physical location.

Google say not to stress too much about choosing your category though, all of them except the local business / place one function in the same way.

You have no analytics in Google + (yet)

From Google

“in the coming weeks we will be launching tools to give you access to as much data as possible about your Google+ Page and +1 activity: who’s interacting with your page and how; your users’ demographics; and info about their social activities like +1′s, shares and comments “

You CAN’T have multiple admins.

Only one representative can have access to the Google+ Business page. This they say they will look at soon… but in the meantime… well it’s hardly ideal. This means you can’t have a social media manager as well as yourself on the page, or different staff members.

You need to use a gmail address as your login email.

Personally I think this is a mistake on Google’s part. Most people do not use gmail as their main email address (perhaps this is something they are trying to shift? ) .

Google encourages more than one page for a business.

You can have different pages for your different products.  Coke have one for diet coke, one for regular etc

Vanity URL’s aren’t available yet either…

…but will likely follow soon.

In the next day or two I’ll be showing you how to set up your Google+ page , optimise it well and connect it to your website. But if you can’t wait go ahead! You can register your page here

Try to remember that your users aren’t going to want to see the same content you’re pushing out to Twitter and Facebook – make sure that you’re thinking about the people that follow you and the unique features of Googleplus.

What do you think? Are you going to add Google+ to your social media campaigns?