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New Tools and Controls to Manage Your Google+ Pages

Geoff Alexander — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:01:00 +0000

Last month we introduced Google+ Pages to provide a new way for you to build a public identity on Google+. We’ve been listening closely to your feedback and today we’re introducing several new tools and controls to help you better manage your pages. These new features will start appearing in Google+ accounts over the next couple days; so if you don’t see them today make sure to come back and look for them later this week.

Multiple Administrators and Ownership Transfer
Starting today, you’ll be able to add up to 50 managers who can login and manage your page with their own accounts. Managers can publish posts, respond to comments, add photos, change profile information, and even add/remove other managers.

We've also added the ability for you to transfer page ownership. Ownership of a page can only be transferred to an existing manager. To do so, click the ‘Transfer Ownership’ link in the new Page Settings panel and then choose one of the managers you’d like to transfer ownership to.

Notification Settings
Another feature we’ve added is a way for you as a page owner to get notifications about actions on your page. With this change, you’ll be able to customize the notifications for your business page separately from your personal profile, allowing you to choose the level of detail that’s most appropriate for you. These new settings allow you to change the email address where page notifications are sent, customize what you’d like to be notified about, and adjust how you’d like to be notified.

To adjust these settings click on the Page Settings link and look for the “Set delivery preferences” section. There, you can set what actions you'd like to be notified about and optionally specify a different email address (than your personal email address) for your page notifications. If you have multiple managers on your account, you might want to change the address to a team address that everyone will have access to.

Unified +1 & Circle Count
We’re also making a change to the +1 count shown on your Google+ Page. Starting today, the bold count on your page will include both your +1’s on Google+ and across the web, as well as the number of people who have added you to a circle. This change will not affect the way +1’s are counted or displayed on ads or search results.

We believe that this simple change will better highlight the number of ways people have chosen to recommend and follow your business with Google.

You can learn more about these new features in the Google+ Help Center. We’re working on even more ways to improve the Google+ experience for your business, so please keep sending us your feedback and stay tuned in 2012!

Michael Nestler, Google+ Pages Engineer

Third Party Tools To Help Manage Your Google+ Page

Geoff Alexander — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:00:00 +0000

Last week, we announced Google+ Pages, which provide a new way for businesses, brands, products, organizations and other entities to build a public identity on Google+. We’re encouraged by the number of pages that have been created and brands’ enthusiasm for building better relationships with their customers on Google+.

Businesses can create and manage their pages directly through Google+. We are committed to working on enhancements and innovative features to offer businesses more flexibility and power to run their pages. We also recognize that some businesses use social media management companies to manage their presence across multiple social networks. So today we’re announcing that Google+ is enabling six companies to test Google+ functionality in their management tools -- Buddy Media, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, HootSuite, Involver, and Vitrue.

These companies will offer a subset of their clients the ability to manage circles, publish to Google+, and monitor usage. To learn more about their services and pricing, check out this page.

We are currently working with these companies so that we can experiment and get feedback. They were selected based on their extensive experience helping brands and businesses manage and analyze their presence on social networks. If you’re a social media management company interested in working with Google+, get in touch with us.

Follow the conversation on Google+.

Posted by Sara McKinley, Product Manager, Google+ Pages

This Week: Google+ Webinar and Help Desk Hangouts!

Geoff Alexander — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:21:00 +0000

As you may already know, last Monday we announced Google+ Pages for businesses, a collection of tools and products to help clients get closer to customers. Over the next two days we’re offering two awesome opportunities for you to learn more about getting your business on Google+:

Tomorrow: Learn with Google Webinar: Getting Your Business on Google+
Wednesday November 16, 2pm ET. Register here.
Join our live webinar hosted by Google+ experts to learn more about how you can bring your company and customers closer together using Google+. Key topics that'll be covered include:

Setting up a Google+ Page for your business
Best practices and early use cases for using Google+
Promoting your Google+ Page
Improving the performance of your ads with +1 annotations

Thursday: Help Desk Hangouts
Thursday November 17, 12pm - 3pm ET. Visit our Google+ Your Business page.
Still have questions? Talk face-to-face with a Google+ expert using our group video chat product, Hangouts. Learn technical tips, content strategies, and potential use cases for your business.

Check out how Zen Bikes uses Google Plus in this awesome video!

Posted by David Weisman, The Google+ Team

Learn how to get your business on Google+

Geoff Alexander — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, we opened up Google+ to businesses, a way for businesses to get closer to their customers. We’ve already seen many brands using Google+ in unique and exciting ways, such as hangouts out with Miss Piggy and style bloggers from Macy’s.

How can you best use Google+ to grow your business? We have set up a number of opportunities for you to learn how to get started:

ad:tech New York keynote: Getting Closer to Your Customers on Google+
Wednesday, November 9, 5:30pm - 6:15pm ET
Join Google’s Head of Social Advertising Products, Christian Oestlien as he maps out the company’s vision for putting people at the center of the web experience and the opportunities Google+ creates for marketers to engage customers in new, better ways. If you can’t make it in person, you can watch the live stream or follow the reaction by searching for #gplusbiz on Google+.

ad:tech New York booth
Wednesday November 9 (10am - 6pm), Thursday November 10 (10am - 4pm)
We’ll also have Google+ experts on hand at ad:tech to answer questions and help you create your own page. We’d love for you to stop by and meet the team!

Learn with Google Webinar: Getting Your Business on Google+
Wednesday November 16, 2pm ET. Register here.
Join our live webinar hosted by Google+ experts to learn more about how you can bring your company and customers closer together using Google+. Key topics that'll be covered include:

Setting up a Google+ Page for your business
Best practices and early use cases for using Google+
Promoting your Google+ Page
Improving the performance of your ads with +1 annotations

Help Desk Hangouts
Thursday November 17, 12pm - 3pm ET. Visit our Google+ Your Business page.
Still have questions? Talk face-to-face with a Google+ expert using our group video chat product, Hangouts. Learn technical tips, content strategies, and potential use cases for your business.

In the meantime, you can check out our Getting Started Guide on our Google+ Your Business site. To keep up to date on the latest tips, add the Google+ Your Business page to your circles.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Get closer to your customers with Google+

Geoff Alexander — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:04:00 +0000

Since the initial launch of Google+ just a few months ago, we’ve welcomed over 40 million people and introduced more than 100 new features. For all these people, one important part is still missing - your business.

We want to help you make the same kinds of lasting connections with your customers online the way you can in real life. That’s why we are introducing Google+ Your Business, a collection of tools and products to help you get closer to your customers. At the heart of this is Google+ Pages, your business’s identity on Google+.

Google+ Pages: Have real conversations with the right people

To get your business on Google+, you first need to create a Google+ Page. On your page, you can post updates and news about your business, engage in conversations with your customers, send tailored messages to specific groups of people, and see how many +1’s you have across the web. Here are a few features of Google+ Pages that we think will help you build relationships:

Google+ Pages are at the heart of Google+ for Business

Hangouts
Sometimes you might want to chat with your customers face-to-face. For example, if you run a bookstore, you may want to invite an author to talk about her latest novel, or if you market a cosmetics line, beauty specialists might want to hold how-to sessions for makeup tips. Hangouts make this easy, by letting you have high-quality video chats with nine customers, with a single click. You can use Hangouts to get product feedback, help solve problems or simply get to know people better, all in real time.

Hangouts let you meet your customers, face to face

Circles
Circles allow you to group followers of your Page into smaller audiences. You can then share specific messages with specific groups. For example, you could create a Circle containing people who are your most loyal customers and offer them a special discount.

+1 button and Google+ badge: Inspire current customers to recommend new ones
Google+ Pages also help you deliver your great content to users in a way that’s easy to share with their friends. We introduced the +1 button as a way for your customers to recommend your business across the web - on Google search, in your ads, on sites across the web and on mobile devices. Now, your customers can +1 your Page, recommending your actual brand -- not just an individual ad or a site -- directly to their friends.

To help your customers find your page and start sharing, we have two buttons you can add to your site by visiting our Google+ badge configuration tool:

The Google+ icon is a small icon that directly links to your Page.

In the coming days, we’re introducing the Google+ badge, which lets people add your page to their circles, without leaving your site, to start getting updates from your business via Google+.

Make your +1’s count, improving the performance of your ads
Coming soon, we will also make it possible to link your Page to your AdWords campaigns for your site, so that all your +1s -- from your Page, your website, ads and search results -- will get tallied together and appear as a single total.

Your +1’s will be shown with your brand wherever it appears, including search, ads, Google+ and your website

Consumers will be able to see all the recommendations your business has received, whether they are looking at an ad, a search result or your page, meaning your +1’s will reach not only the 40 million users of Google+, but all the people who come to Google every day. In the coming days. you'll be able to link your page to your AdWords campaigns by following the instructions in the AdWords Help Center.

You can link your Google+ Page to your AdWords campaign with Social Extensions. Social Extensions are available in the ad extensions tab in your AdWords account.

Bringing Google+ to the rest of Google
Our ultimate vision for Google+ is to transform the overall Google experience-- weaving identity and sharing into all of our products. Beginning today, with a select group of websites at launch, we’re rolling out a new feature, Direct Connect -- an easy way for your customers to find your Google+ Page on Google search. For eligible pages, when someone searches for your business with the ‘+’ sign before it Direct Connect will send them directly to your page. For example, try searching for ‘+YouTube’ on Google. Users will also be prompted to automatically add Pages they find through Direct Connect to their circles. Direct Connect will not work for everyone.

Direct Connect suggestions start populating as you type on Google.com

Just the beginning
We wanted to help you get your business on Google+ as soon as possible, so we’re opening the field trial for Google+ Pages to everyone today. Creating a Google+ Page only takes a few minutes. To get started, you’ll need a personal Google+ profile. If you don’t have a Google account, it’s very quick and easy to join. And if you are looking for inspiration, check out some of the companies that are already starting to set up their Pages:

To learn more about how Google+ works for your business, check out the Google+ Your Business site. We’re just getting started and have many more features in the coming weeks and months. To keep up to date on the latest news and tips, add the Google+ Your Business page to your circles. If you have ideas on how we can improve Google+ for your business, we’d love to hear them.

Posted by Dennis Troper, Product Management Director, Google+ Pages

Doing more with the +1 button, more than 4 billion times a day

Geoff Alexander — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:25:00 +0000

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

In June we launched the +1 button for websites, making it easier to recommend content across the web. In July, the +1 button crossed 2 billion daily views, and we also made it a lot faster. Today the +1 button appears on more than a million sites, with over 4 billion daily views, and we're extremely excited about this momentum.

It's just the beginning, however, and today we're launching two more features that make +1 buttons more useful for users and publishers alike.

Sharing with your circles on Google+
Clicking the +1 button is a great way to highlight content for others when they search on Google. But sometimes you want to start a conversation right away—at least with certain groups of friends. So beginning today, we're making it easy for Google+ users to share webpages with their circles, directly from the +1 button. Just +1 a page as usual and look for the new "Share on Google+" option. From there you can comment, choose a circle and share.

The new +1 button on Rotten Tomatoes

+Snippets
When you share content from the +1 button, you’ll notice that we automatically include a link, an image and a description in the sharebox. We call these "+snippets," and they're a great way to jumpstart conversations with the people you care about.

Of course: publishers can benefit from +snippets as well. With just a few changes to their webpages, publishers can actually customize their +snippets and encourage more sharing of their content on Google+. More details are available on the Google Webmaster blog.

We're rolling out sharing and +snippets globally over the next week, but if you'd like to try the new +1 button now, you can join our Google+ Platform Preview. Once you're part of the Preview, just visit a site with the +1 button (like Rotten Tomatoes) and +1 the page. Thanks for all of your feedback so far, and stay tuned for more features in the weeks and months ahead!

Posted by Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President of Engineering

Google Vs Bing – Which is Best?

GeoffA — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:40:53 +0000

It has been a messy squabble between the two search engine giants, with both sides accusing the other of monopolisation, and Google now claiming Bing is copying their search results. But what does this mean for the rest of us, with our PPC campaigns ready to go? Where do we advertise? Microsoft are shifting assets and focus to try and get their search engine, Bing, a greater market share – and so far it’s working. They have managed to snatch an additional 2% of the market share since December 2010, almost directly from competitor Google. So is it time to jump ship to the growing competitor? Probably not. Bing may have gained 2% of the market share, but this gives them a total of only 12.8%. Compared to Google’s 67.95% market share, it becomes obvious as to where your advert will receive more exposure. That being said, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo Search have now formed a Search Alliance which will allow search advertising to appear on both search engines, and their affiliates, from just one campaign. That basically means you can advertise on two sites for the price of one, and Microsoft claim this will save advertisers 10-20% of their time. In addition, Bing has now partnered with Facebook to incorporate a social aspect to their searches and advertising. They hope that by importing ‘likes’ and other social media commentary from Facebook, they will be able to target searches by recommendation as well as keyword relevance. This sounds like a wonderful new dimension to search engine results, and shows the ever increasing importance social networking sites, such as Facebook, are claiming in the digital world. However, this new level of targeting will only impact on 7.6% of the UK market – and that’s the combined share of Bing and Yahoo search. If you want you advert to be seen by as many people as possible, Google is still the place to be. With a whopping 89.1% share in the UK market, it will be a hard task to shake Google from the top spot. It also seems very likely that Google will rise to the social network challenge itself, perhaps engineering their own ‘social search’ platform. So, for the moment at least, Google is the advertisers search engine of choice.

Geolocation and Local Search

GeoffA — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:52:16 +0000

Marketing by its very nature is to create the flow of people and leads to drive the sales for your business. When you are marketing you need to make sure that your dollar, and energy is spent to get the right kind of leads. The best way to do this of course is not a discrete event of SEO. Success is a process, the rewards you want will only come through testing and ongoing improvement.

Simply put: Local Search and Geolocation is the process that helps local business get sales in a global way. The focus of any marketing of course is targets:

Who are you going after (Target Market)?

How old are they (and other relevant Demographic information)?|

Where are they located?

Our focus will be outlining Search that is relevant for retail, yes even the neighborhood café. Geolocation while sounding complex is really just associating a small geographical area to a Website. This is done to help Search Engines (Google) provide relevant LOCATION and KEYWORD results.

With the advent of so many social geolocation services one should readily take advantage of them, here are a few of our ideas:

Flickr has a geotagging option http://rvr.typepad.com/wind/2010/05/geolocation-data-mining-flickr-canary-islands.htmlfor photos, using thishttp://rvr.typepad.com/wind/2010/05/geolocation-data-mining-flickr-canary-islands.htmland linking to your blog is an added bonus.

Get involved with Foursquare http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/183710 link your business and offer rewards to individuals that are regulars.

Add Facebook Placeshttp://www.facebook.com/marketing to your Facebook FanPage Facebook Places will be a powerful tool for businesses to engage the vast Facebook social network, and identify what really matters to customers.

Tag all your content for the location your going after this is relatively simple using popular content management such as WordPress. Be consistent. Most important be careful with others privacy! http://www.llrx.com/features/geolocation.htm

Some of this data came from http://www.mcanerin.com/en/articles/301-redirect-geolocation.asp

Location: Certain businesses are domain and geo centric, a good case in point would be UK Legal Advice, if you are in South Africa for example this search result would not be helpful.
Keyword: optimization is only one aspect remember everything must be built around context and purpose.
Google is the only major search engine currently that uses IP address for geolocation – so the old adage of hosting your business in the country you wish to service does not always ring true. It helps but is not always the case Yahoo and Ask for example understand that many people host outside their country.
Other search engines use 2 methods of discovering what area a web site is relevant to: 1) the ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain) and 2) link analysis – they assume that if a very large number of UK websites link to you, that you must be relevant to UK, regardless of your hosting location.

http://www.seobloom.com/article/111/international-seo-and-geolocation-top-10-factors/

On page search engine optimization towards the – country – city. The elements, if they are identified as the target market, should be mentioned in titles, keywords, meta tags, content, on page titles, links etc within the website.
External links to the website should have the region – country – city within them
Have a regional specific phone number.
List yourself in local online directories.
Use a Google map that shows your business location.

Google buys AdMob – will they give it away later?

GeoffA — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:38:00 +0000

Google has just announced it is buying a company specialising in
mobile technology. AdMob, the Silicon Valley company specialises more in display advertising while Google specialises in Search. Read more details in The Guardian

This is just one more acquisition by Google who has already spent more than several countries’ GDP acquiring expertise. The interesting part is that often the knowledge bought at great cost is often given away for free later.

The company with the Analytics technology, for example, used to charge a considerable sum for the use of the tools – now Google makes them available for free.

Buying up competition or related companies and then charging little for use is a very unusual strategy, but an excellent business model for domination.

The list of Google purchases is extensive. Some of the better known include YouTube, Facebook and Blogger the blogging platform.

There is a recession, and it could be the perfect time for small companies to take a leaf out of Google’s book. First you make a lot of money from the core business (Adwords, if you are Google) and then that funding allows you to provide an even better customer experience by acquiring related businesses.

What are you waiting for?!