When Google+ launched earlier this year, we set up a brand page for Social Media Club and invested several days into building our corporate profile and connecting with our members on the platform. It was a hack of course, as the system wanted a first name/last name, gender and more – but we wanted to experiment with Google+ and it was important to dive in early. We launched our account on June 30, 2011. A week later, the Google+ team announced all non-user (‘brand’) profiles would be immediately terminated and businesses were asked to refrain from setting up accounts until the Google+ platform was ready for us.
This morning Google+ announced that it is finally opening its platform up to brands, and launched several pages like Macy’s, Angry Birds and the WWE to get things going. In the coming weeks, they will open up the service to more businesses and you can get in line by signing up for an invite at plus.google.com/pages/create.
The community manager in me wishes the Google+ team ran the list of brand pages they terminated last July and sent us all an early invite into the platform as a way to reward our early support, but no crying over split milk here. I am just happy they finally have the system in place to support bbrands and give us the opportunity to participate on their platform as I do think Google+ has great potential. It would behoove businesses to set up a profile and experiment with the service as I already find that while my personal ‘network’ is relatively small, anything shared on Google+ does seem to get more attention that the same item on Facebook or Twitter (noise to content ratio is low, which of course will change over time). Add in Google+ posts being added to search results and this great potential to build awareness for your businesses.
I just requested an invite for Social Media Club, will you be requesting one too?
