5 Reasons for Using Google+ to Market Your Business
Since it was launched in June 2011, Google+ has grown to be the third largest social network online with 170 million users1. While this is still a long way behind the 900 million on Facebook, using Google+ has many other advantages that Facebook and Twitter can’t provide. Google has been integrating many of its services in an effort to “build a seamless social experience, all across Google”2 and the foundation of that integration is in Google+. This has many marketers looking at Google+ as a new marketing platform and as many as 78% of online marketers are planning to make use of it3. Here are five good reasons why you should also be using Google+ to market your business.
Integrating Your Online Presence via Google+ Makes Your Business More Visible Online
When you create a Google+ account, you also automatically create a Gmail and a YouTube account to go with it and it gives you access to most of Google’s other Internet services as well. By connecting your corporate website and other online profiles to your Google+ user name, you are ensuring that Google will connect all of those elements in your search results and will display them all in your Knowledge Graph display. As people begin to log into their Google+ profiles to take advantage of Google’s personalized search results, where their friends’ reviews and comments will appear on Knowledge Graph, having a business page that you have more control over is going to be more important.
Having a Google+ Profile is Good for SEO
Connecting your company website to its Google+ page and posting links on the site to your latest blog posts will ensure that web crawlers reach them sooner, and thus, they will appear in the SERPs sooner. Because Google will give a high credibility rating to the links on its own social network, these sorts of postings will generate a better page ranking than similar link postings on Twitter or Facebook will.
Google+ Users are More Open to Marketing Than on Many Other Social Sites
Facebook users are notoriously averse to marketing and there is so much spam on Twitter that users have become accustomed to scrolling past it without a second glance. Conversely, on Google+, engagement rates with business postings have been good and are acceptable to users who tend to be more professionally oriented on the site.
It is Still Early Enough in the Google+ Lifecycle to be Established Before Your Competitors
Google+ is only a little over a year old, so it is still very much in its developmental stage and building its user numbers. Because there are still so few users on the site, it is still possible to beat your competitors to this new advertising real estate and to be fully established on the site before they are.
It’s Free and Easy to Use
Probably the best reason that every business should be involved with Google+ is that it is free. Claiming your Google+ Local business listing and creating a Google+ Business Page costs nothing but time, and is very easy to do for most people with a bit of computer savvy. Advertising with the potential exposure that Google is offering can cost a huge amount of money, and simply by using the services that Google provides for free, it is possible to expose your business and brands to millions of people.
Google is indisputably the major search engine on the web today with almost two-thirds of all search traffic4 and that doesn’t seem likely to change in the near future. As most online traffic comes from search engines, it just makes sense to do everything that is possible to make them work for you.
References:
1. http://googleblog.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/toward-simpler-more-beautiful-google.html
2. http://googleblog.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/toward-simpler-more-beautiful-google.html
3. 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, Michael A Stelzner, Social Media Examiner
