Although they weren’t initially available, as of last week any business can now set up a page on Google+.

To get started, you’ll need to already have a personal Google+ account. Just go to the Google+ Create A Page tool. Here’s what it looks like:

 

Admin rights

On here you need to kick off by adding basic information such as your brand name and your URL. As the page creator you will also be the admin. At the moment no-one else gets to be admin, and you can’t transfer admin rights to anyone else.

Personalised URLs

At the moment you don’t get to choose a “vanity” URL like you can for your Facebook page. It is however important to get the name of your page right, because if you change it you will have to restart the verification process.

Getting the right category

You have to choose to put your business into one of five categories:

  • Local Business or Place
  • Product or Brand
  • Company, Institution or Organization
  • Arts, Entertainment or Sports
  • Other

What local pages offer

For local businesses there are some extra options including adding a phone number, an address and working hours, with the intention that people can use a Google+ page to find and visit a business. In this way it’s quite similar to a Google Places page.

You can also Act Like A Page

In the same way as Facebook, you can choose to use Google+ as your business page rather than as an individual, to do things like sharing photos and videos, links, and to conduct hangouts.

Using 3rd party tools

At the moment it’s not possible to post updates to your Google+ page using tools like Tweetdeck, since Google haven’t yet released the API for Google+.

Following

Unlike Twitter, Pages can only follow people once they have themselves been followed. but not until they’ve been first followed.

You can have more than 1 Page

As a business you can have more than one Google+ page. For example, you might want one for a number of different products, models or sub-brands; and a corporate one too.

Following a business

In order to follow a business, users must add it to a circle (purple in the diagram below), and not +1 it (orange), which may cause confusion.

 

+1 ing a page

Google say that a Google+ page will reconcile all the +1s that a brand has had, be that on a Google+ page or any URL or product on their site, giving an overall indication of popularity.

 

Getting official

Google plans to create a new icon similar to Facebook’s Facepile to encourage to following of business pages:

There’s already a badge maker page although its currently a bit thin on the ground. Google plans to also create a Verified Name programme for well known brands.

Direct Connect

Google have added a new feature to the search results called ‘Direct Connect’, which allows users to search for a business’ Google+ page by just adding a ‘+’ to the start of the brand name.

 

Verifying a page

To stop anyone creating a page for a brand, Google has introduced a verification process that ties a page to a website.

In order to do this you need to use:

  • Rel=”publisher” on at least the homepage of your site to link to your Google+ page
  • A Link from your page back to home page or main page of the site

Google also suggests using the new icon from the badge maker page. For more information about the verification process take a look here.

That’s it

Google+ pages are an exciting way that brands can make use of the fastest growing social network, and one which will undoubtedly have increasing impact on SEO. Good luck setting up your page, and let us know how you get on.

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