4 Ways Google+ Can Help You Grow Your Business

When talking about social networks, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are the big three, and usually the other platforms are little more than an afterthought.  However, even though Google+ is only the number-seven social networking site in terms of market share, it can still deliver tremendous value for many businesses.

The key is to think of Google+ not as a traditional social network, but more like a “social layer” of your company’s presence on Google.  Adding a Google+ profile to your company’s social strategy will provide a substantial boost to your search performance, which makes creating a profile worthwhile, even if you don’t wind up with a massive following compared to Twitter and Facebook.

Here are four ways Google+ can help you grow your business:

1. Improve your search presence.  Creating a Google+ page for your business makes you eligible to have an expanded search profile appear about your company in the sidebar of Google search results.  The most basic advantage of this is that it dramatically increases the amount of space on the screen dedicated to your brand.  Simply put, more screen-share means a greater likelihood of getting noticed, and therefore getting clicked.  Not only that, it also allows people to add you to their Google+ circles directly from the search results and shows your recent Google+ post activity (so you should make sure to have some).Another advantage is that this is free exposure. Whereas many businesses will pay a significant amount of money to show plain, three-line text ads in the right side of Google search results by buying AdWords, your Google+ profile will provide you with a large, media-rich, colorful, and interactive area in this coveted part of the Google search results page at no cost.
2. Increase AdWords clicks.  Even though having a Google+ profile will help you get a larger presence for some keywords related to your company, that doesn’t mean you will be able to stop your AdWords campaigns.  The good news is that a Google+ profile will also help you increase the results you get from AdWords ­­— in fact, advertisers with a Google+ page linked to their ads usually see a 5-10% increase in clicks according to Google!By using the “Social Annotations” feature for the new enhanced campaigns in Adwords, you can link your Google+ profile to your AdWords account.  Social annotations display things like endorsements from your Google+ followers and the number of people who have you in their circles.  The social proof that comes along with having a lot of other customers follow and endorse your brand is a signal to prospects that they should also trust your company’s products and/or services.
3. Gather crucial social network data.  Google+ also allows you to collect crucial data about your social presence that can help you improve your campaigns.  The Google Ripples view allows you to identify the key influencers who are sharing your posts by visualizing the spread of your content.  If you can identify the people who are helping you reach a wider audience, you can reach out to them to create strategic partnerships to help build the exposure for both of your businesses.The “Social Reports” feature in Google Analytics allows you to track the effect your social media campaigns have on your website metrics and conversions.  Google automatically identifies traffic from social networks and then aggregates it into valuable reports.  For example, if you have conversions set up on your page, you can visit the Traffic Sources > Social > Conversions report to get a detailed analysis of the impact of your social media presence on your conversions.
4. Interact with your customers, prospects, and followers in real time.   The hangouts feature of Google+ allows you to host a public video call with a group of any size.  There are numerous high-value ways to use this to help grow your business.For example, instead of paying a market research firm a substantial amount of money to conduct a focus group, you could host a Google+ hangout with your target market to get the same feedback virtually.  If you develop software, you could use hangouts to conduct virtual usability testing.

   If you read our previous post about creating a podcast and are interested in hosting interviews to both increase your company’s reputation and share helpful information with your following, you could do a live, public Google+ hangout to conduct the interview.  This will allow people to join and watch in real time, and you can also record it for your archives, which means one Google+ hangout interview will turn into as much as four pieces of content for your brand.

   1. The original, live interview
   2. The video recording of the interview
   3. The audio from the interview for your podcast (you will need to find a way to separate it from the video recording)
   4. The written transcription of the interview (For more about this read the post about developing a podcast.)

Tell us how your company has had success with Google+ in the comments!