Google Plus Business Pages Released

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The long expected Google+ Pages for Business have just been released! As announced on the official blog Google “wants to make sure we can build relationships with all the things we care about, from local businesses to global brands“!

A lot of people (including my sociable and nice self) from marketers and business owners to plain simple users were highly excited expecting this new feature from the first launch of Google+.

The outcome proved to be a bit.. ah well, disappointing! The new Google+ Pages tend to have a striking similarity to Facebook Pages, and even those of an earlier development stage. Instead of actually bringing some new insight in this field or new exciting features they are back on copying each other without much innovation or creativity!

As soon as I heard about the launch I went ahead and made a Vectorash.ro Google+ page. It took me less than 5 minutes, because you don’t really have much to work with or any opportunity for expressing more creativity. You add the name, few words as a description, a link, a couple of pictures and that’s it..  Now all of your business or brand‘s loyal fans and customers can +1 your page (Google “Like” it!) and/or may add your page to their circles and receive your spam, ah I mean notifications and updates.

The only problem with this logic is that  most of the people are still using Facebook.  And this new “features – rich” business opportunity from Google is not bringing any substantial motivation for a social networking platform switch. I am of course sure that they are working on improving these pages and planning to add other new features and functionalities.

There is though something new that Google already brings to the table, the Google+ Direct Connect (sound like Facebook Connect but it’s not the same)

This is the ability to connect your Google Page to your web site. It makes it very simple for people to find your brand and even share the “+1“ appreciations.

More about that, here:

There are already a number of privileged brands that were allowed to build their Google+ Pages in advance.  Some examples:

Google (of course)

Angry Birds

Muppets

Pepsi

Toyota

To create your own Google+ Page all you have to do is go to https://plus.google.com/pages/create.

Google said nothing though about the real true main advantage they can leverage in this business pages war with Facebook: the search results benefits! It is of course a tricky subject, they can not be to forward on giving special favors to Google Pages based on anti-trust and legal challenges.

On the other hand I am sure they will find some loopholes allowing them to bring some sort of an edge in making Google+ Pages as the better choice!