Google+ for business – part 2

Last week Pages was finally released on Google+, allowing businesses to maintain an official presence on the platform.  The eventual outcome of the development of Pages didn’t go down well in all circles, with ardent Google+ fan Robert Scoble finding it one poor release too many from the platform, although Google+  has promised to rectify the most glaring of deficiencies.  

Google+ Pages; Like Facebook pages, but worse

As much as businesses and brands have been anticipating another channel and the enhanced opportunities that it may bring, they were equally disappointed when the release eventually happened.  For those managing social presence on Facebook, the immediate impact of basic community management functionality was an eye opener -  a quick chat with anyone responsible for community management would have led to a far better feature set.  At present, Pages allow you to:

• Write posts, including uploading pictures and video
• Put people into Circles and filter the distribution of posts to Circles (Following, Customers, VIPs and Team members are set up as default)
• Write a short profile about your brand / business
• Umm, that’s it…

Mark Zuckerberg must have been having a quiet chuckle into his cornflakes when he looked through Pages on the morning of its release.  Of course, Google has promised brands that more functionality is coming, and with certain social tools getting early API access to allow the management of pages, this has started to happen (although they are necessary given the deficiencies of using just Google+ to manage Pages).

But what about engagement?

The numbers for audience and engagement reflect in part the current restrictive model for Pages.  Even when normalising across number of users between Facebook and Google+ (approximately 800M and 50M respectively at the time of writing), it isn’t that positive for Google+. Taking Pepsi as an example (one of the headline brands to receive a Google+ Page), it has 6.29 million followers on the main Facebook page as opposed to 19.2 thousand on its Google+ Page – normalised  against total audience, Facebook still leads by a factor of more than 10.  This may in part be down to engagement, with the Facebook community managers at Pepsi posting multiple stories per day and engaging across tabs and applications – in contrast, on Google+ the last post was seven days ago, although posts generate similar numbers of comments regardless of the disparity in follower numbers.

So is it one to forget about?

There is no doubt about it - Google has scored an own goal with the release of Pages and will need to scramble fast to resurrect the reputation of the Google+ platform to the brand managers that have been patiently waiting.  Since the sign-up procedure for Pages is so quick and simple, there is little reason not to create a simple page, if only as a land grab on your brand term for the platform.  It is unfortunate, however, that until Google gives businesses the tools and materials to be able to invest in the platform, there is little reason to spend time and money trying to create something useful from the paucity of what is available.

This blog post was written by Gemma Mahoney.

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