Today Google released the long-awaited feature of Business Pages on Google+. There were a few glitches early this morning (Australia time) which are now apparently fixed and sign-up is available to everyone.
You can find Traffika's Google+ Page here.
Creating a Page for your company/brand on Google+ is easy: simply log in to Google, head to https://plus.google.com/pages/create, fill in the details and you're away.
The process is much the same as setting up a Facebook Page in that you nominate the type of enterprise and your general industry.
I thought this was an interesting note when going through the sign-up process, in the field for entering your company URL. Might get some of the SEO brains ticking over...
Once you have gone through the process and created the page, your personal Google+ profile is now the administrator and you can toggle posting as your Page and posting as yourself. This is done with the drop-down next to your profile pic on the left hand side.
Using Google+ as your Page is exactly like using it as your personal profile, except every update, +1, comment, photo, etc appears as your company. If you are an administrator of a Facebook Page you'll be familiar with interacting this way; for newbies it might take a little getting used to.
To see which profile you're currently posting as, simply check the top left hand corner of the page.
First steps
After you've filled out the initial information, uploaded a profile pic and shared the page with your own Google+ network, the next step is to nominate your own website as a recommended URL in the settings.
Simply head to your 'About' section on your business page and click the 'Edit Profile' link on the top right hand side. Then, under the 'Recommended Links' section, add your company URL.
Depending on how your business is structured, you may also like to set up individual Google+ Pages for the different products or departments you manage. For example, Coca-Cola might create a page for Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, etc.
Google itself does this, having already created Pages for all their brands. Head to the Traffika Google+ Page if you'd like to add all the Google Pages in to your network. I've shared our Google Circle as a link on our wall.
The Traffika profile follows most of the companies, brands and celebrities who've signed up so far, so feel free to dig around in our Circles lists if you are looking for some Brand Pages to follow.
It's also a good idea to claim your vanity URL while it's likely to be still available. The URL shortener for personal G+ profiles, gplus.to, also works for Pages, which is good news.
All you need to do here is nominate a nickname and paste in your G+ ID (the long list of numbers in your Page's URL), and you're away.
Your vanity URL will look something like http://gplus.to/traffika.
So far the Pages interface is quite good, and the availability for sharing content as a Brand is flexible and easy, however I did have some trouble when trying to edit and tag people in a photo I uploaded.
If you'd like to set up a Google+ Page for your business, give it a go and let us know if you come across any insights, issues or questions. Best of luck!
Chris
is a specialist inSocial Media Strategy at
Traffika.
Join Chris on Google+.
