Should you commit to marketing your business on Google+?

marketing business on Google+

Wired says (link is external) Google+ is "growing at Facebook speed". It's a great headline, but what does it mean for businesses?

Should you market your business on Google+?

Or more precisely, can you afford to keep ignoring Google+? Should you stop pouring all that energy into Facebook Pages that Facebook won't (link is external) let (link is external) most of your fans see, even with (link is external) the new Page-based News Feed?

Is the Google+ approach (link is external) to advertising, using surfacing social proof in search (link is external), more enterprise-friendly?

Horowitz, who helped lead the creation of the Google+ social network, is spending today talking up Google+ to potential advertisers. In the interview, he repeatedly cited Google+’s approach to business users and advertising as more elegant and effective for advertisers, less intrusive for users, and less awkward and even less condescending than Facebook’s approach.
From www.wired.com (link is external)

As far as Facebook goes, the jury is still out. Facebook's "Like-gate" may be just the beginning of Facebook's real business model, as this article (link is external) explains.

Facebook is showing us how they will cross the chasm from low-CTR low-CPM ad-units into what investors have been waiting for since the beginning: a Facebook analogue to Google Adwords.
From daltoncaldwell.com (link is external)

Many businesses are continuing their Facebook investment despite the reduced audience for their feeds, waiting to see what will happen and unwilling to lose the following they've invested marketing time and money in.

But you can't afford to ignore Google+ anymore. Whether they really (link is external) have "135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month (link is external)" or not, they are Google, and your customers are using Google to search (unless they're using Bing, which as we recently noted, a surprising amount of them are!).

So businesses need to get in the Google+ game, start marketing on their Google+ presence, and start using Google's Google+ incentives to boost their ranking.

For example, we recently started using Google Verified Author tags on our blog. Your company can get a search boost by having your blogger add (link is external) these simple tags to your content marketing. This week Google rolled out Google+ Communities (link is external), which are a Groups function; you can join and become active in Communities that relate to your business and connect with influencers (link is external). We joined the already-actually-quite-awesome "Makers, hackers, artists & engineers" community as well the slightly awkward "Geek" community. (Although we secretly wanted to join the "Walking Dead Circle"!)

Here in the Bay Area, where the tech community strongly resisted Google+ at launch because of privacy concerns about their "real names (link is external)" and gender identification (link is external) policies, it's been very hard to get onboard with Google+ as a business tool.

But the smart money is on Google in the long run, as this CNET article (link is external) about why G+ doesn't have to beat Facebook to work details. If you're really doubtful about committing marketing resources from your bsuiness to Google+, you can create a Google Analytics Custom Campaign. (link is external)  Just assign tags to the links you post in Google+, then track the traffic they're referring. Or you can simply gamble on Google, because as Dorie Clark explains (link is external) in Forbes, nobody's really certain about anything in social marketing right now.

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