Social media marketing has become an integral part of any digital marketing campaign, and cross-platform promotion is at the heart of the game. Most businesses utilize Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn or some combination of these sites to promote their brand and engage with fans. The art of social media marketing is constantly growing and evolving, yet many companies seem hesitant to make the jump to using Google Plus as a mainstream component of their campaign.

By engaging fans and followers in a two-way dialogue, social media marketing can facilitate discussion, spread of content, and feedback from users. Making use of all relevant platforms at your disposal, including Google Plus, can help your brand remain relevant and relatable to fans and consumers. With its large and growing user base, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Google Plus is not a platform marketers can afford to continue ignoring.

Google+ Users

After launching in 2011, Google Plus reached 10 million users within just two weeks, which grew to an impressive 100 million within its first year. Today, Google Plus ranks among the top social media sites in the world, trumped only by Facebook, with 359 million active users according to Global Web Index. With a varied user demographic that is continually expanding, Google Plus might be just the tool you need to bump up your brand awareness.

Almost everyone with a Gmail account is familiar with the platform, as a Google email address and password double as the credentials needed to login to a Google Plus account. This means that users are not required to create and remember a new set of login details in order to activate a Google Plus account; it also makes it easier to link up with people from your contact lists and for new members to develop circles quickly.

Google+ Pages

In late 2011, Google launched a new feature to allow businesses and brands to create pages on Google Plus, which function similarly to the regular Google Plus profiles created by individual users, but with a few key differences. A page is designed to provide a Google Plus presence for an organization, brand, public figure or product—much like how public pages work on Facebook. Each Google Plus account, be it a page or a profile, has the ability to create circles and define privacy settings for each one, share posts, videos and pictures, as well as create Google Hangouts.

Setting up a page for your business or brand is free and simple, but Google provides a quick walkthrough for anyone who is unsure of how to get started. Google allows you to assign more than one manager per page so that several administrative users can have access to updating the page through unique logins. The site also permits transfer of ownership if you choose to pass the responsibility of the page on to someone new.

Understanding the Potential of Google Plus

So, let’s get down to it: what are the major benefits of Google Plus pages? For one thing, having a presence on Google Plus can improve SEO for your website. Most companies link to their websites from their Google Plus page (and vice versa), which can bring more views to both. Creating a Google Plus page increases Google’s overall knowledge of your site, helping Google recognize which search queries your site is most relevant to when someone uses the search engine, potentially increasing your rank in the search results and bringing more traffic to your website.

Receiving customer reviews on your Google Plus page is good for business in several ways: it boosts your brand’s credibility and presence on the site, and a greater number of consumer interactions on Google Plus can lead to a higher SEO score. You can also boost your credibility on the site through receiving +1’s, which are how Google Plus users show support for single posts or entire pages. The more influential the user who gives you a +1, the more the ‘vote’ will help your overall rankings.

Diversifying your online marketing also allows more cross posting of content to ensure it reaches as many users as possible.

Does Google Plus Offer An Edge Over Facebook and Twitter?

One of the reasons marketers hesitate to diversify their social media efforts with a Google Plus page is that they already have accounts on other major social media networks. If most of the consumers on Google Plus already have Twitter and Facebook, what’s the value to marketers of focusing on yet another site? However, Google Plus does offer several features that Facebook and Twitter do not, including integration of Google AdWords and Google Plus local pages.

The most obvious advantage Google Plus has over competing social sites is its integration with other Google Products. A Google Plus local page is different than a regular Google Plus page, and is linked to a business address through Google Maps listings; these local pages present another avenue for user-brand interaction. Customers can post reviews and feedback on the local pages and once a company or brand verifies the page, the local page will be merged with any existing Google Plus page for the brand. If you take advantage of this feature, anyone who discovers your company through Google Maps will have a direct link to your Google Plus page.

As if the opportunity to integrate with other Google products isn’t reason enough to get on board with Google Plus, the sheer size and growth rate of the platform should persuade you. Google Plus has already eclipsed Twitter as the number two social media network in the world, and offers far greater freedom and potential for connectivity and engagement with fans.

What do you think about Google Plus? Let us know in the comments!