Why marketers should pay attention to Google+

While it may be a little early to speculate, let’s go ahead and look at some of the potential draw cards.

According to Quirk social media manager, Catherine Scott, social media promises integration of internet technology and your social world. It is about merging online and real life experiences. In today’s world we tend to spend a lot of time online and it’s important that we feel like that time is used effectively.

Facebook achieved this to a degree but it has fallen a little short in some areas. While Facebook offers users the ability to link up with friends, chat with them, share interesting information, organise events, collate a phone book, create an online photo gallery and much more, there is a draw-back. You need to log in to Facebook in order to do these things. This means that users are drawn away from their other online activities and platforms. Integration should be seamless and unfortunately this is not entirely the case with Facebook, with an increasing number of users experiencing a sense of ‘Facebook fatigue’.

Now with Google+ everything you do online (if you use Google as a search engine – and according to Karma Snack 85.72% of internet users do) is connected to your digital social world. So for instance, if you have a Google+ account, and you search for hotels in Cape Town, you are more likely to get results that other contacts connected to your Google+ account have already +1′d. A +1 (plus one) is Google’s version of a Facebook Like.

So what does this mean for organisations?

Consider that social media platforms are spaces that large groups of people already interact in. Many brands have turned to platforms like Facebook and Twitter and the like to market and engage with online communities. Google+ offers yet another avenue for them to follow, and a potentially attractive one at that.

Later this year, Google will launch a full Google+ business platform. And as with the existing Google+ platform, there are some major potential benefits of using the Google+ business offering.

For one, many businesses already use Google AdWords or Google display advertising. Consider how integration might improve a brand’s ability to target these adverts. If your fans are all on Google+, it could mean great things in terms of delivering content that speaks to their needs.

Google+ also uses ‘circles’ to add contacts. This tool offers ease of use and easy segmentation of different groups of contacts. For personal pages these could be friends, family, co-workers etc, and the actual group segments are only known to the page owner. If this is carried through to the Google+ business option, it would present a great opportunity for targeting and community database segmentation.

The integration of Google+ with other Google services such as analytics, search, YouTube, Blogger etc, also means that the platform could offer the means to build more holistic views of users. User privacy is a huge issue here, as this was another area in which Facebook consistently failed to answer to users’ concerns.

After the launch of Google+ and in the absence of a bespoke business platform, many brands created personal pages in order to explore the site and look at marketing and community engagement options. But Google already had plans of its own and suspended these rogue profiles. (On a side note, they’ve also suspended or deleted profiles of users who create accounts in pseudonyms – a potential problem for anonymous writers and bloggers!)

Without a full understanding of what Google+ for business will ultimately offer, speculation is rife. But the possibilities are certainly intriguing. In the mean time, consider starting up a private Google+ account of your own and exploring the platform. Also remember that social media should always be integrated into your entire digital marketing strategy and should make sense from a business perspective.

Keryn Brews is a research writer for Quirk Education. Interested in learning more about social media and how it can benefit your digital marketing efforts?  Visit http://www.quirk.biz/courses/socialmedia for more information.

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