What Is Google Plus?
Google Plus is Google’s latest attempt at breaking into the world of social networks. The platform launched for personal users back in June 2011 and was launched publicly to businesses in September 2011. This is not the first time the search giants have attempted to compete against the likes of Facebook, with the social products Orkut, Google Buzz and Wave which are now very faint memories.
This time however, Google mean business. By integrating the social network with their already popular products from search to YouTube – it is already boasting an impressive 62 million users. This following is growing at over 625,000 per day.
How Personal Users Benefit
Unlike Facebook, Google don’t allow you to set up a stand-alone business name for a profile. Before you can create a Google Plus business page, you’ll need to create your own personal profile. This will benefit you from socialising with friends and managing business pages too. There are many more benefits being active on the network too including
benefits of Google Plus for businesses.
Improve Your Personal Visibility
Personal branding is very important in social media. People search for people as well as businesses. In terms of
SEO, content shared from personal profiles tends to perform well for organic search - it’s indexed almost instantly and ranks well.
Authorship and Sharing
Google Plus is a great way to share and have your content shared. If you want to improve your credibility and have an authoritative voice within your industry, Google Plus allows you to claim ownership of your content and displays your profile information beside your article. Social signals are now considered an important factor to determine rankings.
Build a Following
Currently, there are more personal profiles than business pages on Google Plus. The latest Google Plus statistics reveal the top 25 profiles have between 600,000 and 1.2 million followers. The top business page only has 300,000 followers. However, business pages were not launched until November 2011. So, personal profiles are still the most effective way to build a loyal follower base.
Try as you might, it will be difficult to escape from Google Plus in 2012. But why would you want to? There are no doubts in our minds that Google Plus is going to be big part of search and social in the future.
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