Are you ready to spend even more time social networking?

How much of your mar­ket­ing bud­get and/or time goes to Social Net­work­ing? Most busi­nesses have some sort of pres­ence on at least Face­book and LinkedIn. And maybe Twit­ter and YouTube.

Google + per­sonal pro­files have been out for a while but it was another month before busi­ness pages were launched. It’s going to take some time before we can tell what kind of social networking/marketing share this new ser­vice is going take from Face­book, Twit­ter and LinkedIn, but it’s Google so we can’t ignore it. A piece of advice I read recently in an arti­cle at Mar­ket­ing Mag­a­zine UK is to not rush into build­ing a Google+  Busi­ness Page until you have a clear strat­egy. Makes sense… So of course we did the oppo­site and just went ahead. For us, it’s okay not to have a strat­egy because the whole point is to learn more.  We do agree with the advice though and sug­gest you set up per­sonal pro­file first to famil­iar­ize your­self with how it works.

There are plenty of resources about Google+ out there if you search. Many of the arti­cles are great but tech­ni­cal or long.  We decided to begin our explo­ration of Google+ by com­par­ing one of their new shar­ing fea­tures to Facebook’s. We were curi­ous about these and thought it might be some­thing you  be inter­ested in. What I am talk­ing about is the new +1 icons and g+ icons. We have them on our web­site home page side­bar if you would like to try them . And the Google Plus but­ton below in this post works too.

There are sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences. The Google +1 but­tons that now appear around the Inter­net on Google searches and on web­sites are pretty sim­i­lar to Face­book like but­tons. If you click on one they behave the same way. If you are not logged into your Google account, Gmail for exam­ple, you will first be prompted do that and then your ‘like’, or ‘plus’ in this case is recorded for that web page.

The new but­tons, like the one at the left, are called Google + Direct Con­nect but­tons. When you click on one, you will be taken to the owner’s Google+ Page. You can view their feed, share, ‘+1′  and ‘fol­low’ the same as you would a Face­book feed. So it’s sim­i­lar to hav­ing a Face­book icon on your site that con­nects to your Face­book pro­file. Our feel­ing is this is going to help your SEO efforts for being found in Google searches (maybe only in a small way but every lit­tle bit helps). It con­nects you directly to Google so it can’t hurt. Here’s an excerpt from a Web Pro Newsletter:

“Google+ has intro­duced a whole new realm of SEO pos­si­bil­i­ties based on get­ting found via Google’s own properties.

For one, Google ranks Google+ posts in search results, and they often appear on the first page.

The +1 but­ton obvi­ously helps your search vis­i­bil­ity cause. Google made it clear from the begin­ning that this would be a search sig­nal. If enough peo­ple like your con­tent enough to give it a +1, it must be good right? Why not bump it up in the rankings. ”

The more of their tools you use and inter­con­nect, the more vis­i­ble and eas­ier to find you will be in Google searches. Searchers will be able to find your + busi­ness page by using the + added to their search term. Here is how they explain it on their Direct Con­nect info page:

“Google+ Direct Con­nect lets you quickly nav­i­gate to a Google+ page (and even add that page to your cir­cles) when using Google Search. For exam­ple, if you searched for the query ‘+youtube’ or ‘+pepsi,’ you could be imme­di­ately taken to the YouTube Google+ page, or the Pepsi Google+ page, and given the option to add the page to your circles.”

So hav­ing a Google+ Busi­ness Page is another way for folks to find you and fol­low you. Start think­ing about it now, plan­ning for it soon, and it’s very impor­tant, we feel, to begin con­sid­er­ing what to name your Google + busi­ness page.