Yesterday, Ryan McBurney shared some insights into the power of Google+ for brands and businesses, as well as some actionable advice in our latest downloadable FREE Tip Sheet.
Continuing with that theme, in our latest Magnet Minute video, Amy shares her own thoughts on why your business should be on Google Plus as a part of your social media marketing and how to get started.
For those who question whether there is an audience to market to on the network, Google Plus’ latest statistics show they have a reach of 250 million users, 150 million of them active on a monthly basis. 75 million are active on a daily basis for an average of 12 minutes. This makes their monthly total an average of 360 minutes on Google+, very much comparable to the 441 average monthly minutes of active Facebook users.
When you get started on the network, you’re going to want to start a business page for your brand on Google+. It helps Google classify the brand name as a business across all of their platforms and gives you more options in terms of monitoring and reach. You can have multiple admins, similar to Facebook fan pages. And recently, Hootsuite, a popular third-party social media monitoring platform, incorporated Google Plus brand pages monitor. So that tool is now readily available for your marketing or community management team to implement.
Make sure your business page is properly branded so it easily connects to your business’ logo and color scheme. Much like on Facebook, it’s typical for the profile picture to be a company logo and the cover photo to be a more styled image related to your business matching in design with your existing branding. The profile picture is the most important real estate because most of your followers will see your updates in the news feed where your cover photo does not play a role.
As a business page on Google Plus, you are able to “Circle” other brands and people on the network by organizing them into audiences, called Circles. (Note that brand pages cannot actually follow back individual people unless they first follow—or “circle”—your page.) This comes in really useful for you to track different types of profiles’ activity, especially your company’s more interactive followers. When you start keeping track of those people who interact with your page most often and start returning the favor, you’re nurturing the relationship of people who are likely to be your biggest brand advocates on and off the site. You can also segment certain status updates to go to certain Circles, so if you wanted to give your advocates a discount for all they’ve done you can do that on Google Plus.
Last but not least, make sure you’re updating the account with multimedia status updates. Video and photos are the most attention-grabbing format on Google Plus because they are so prominently displayed. Facebook doesn’t make YouTube videos as big as they do on Google Plus news feeds, so you have a great opportunity to work the video angle on this network. Text is also more visible on Google Plus because of the different font format methods you can use (bold, italics, etc.) but when you can use multimedia you are likely to get more eyes on your updates.
Do you have some advice for Google Plus business use? Leave a comment below!
[ Check out all of Amy's Magnet Minute videos on YouTube -- and be sure to subscribe! ]
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Amy Schmittauer is the Founder & Face of Savvy Sexy Social. She is a social media frenzy working as a freelance video blogger, writer, and social relations consultant. Connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, and Google +.
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