Google+ Brand Pages Showing in Search Results

Out of world’s top 100 brands,77 have Google+ brand page.According to Bright Edge there has been a 50 percent increase in the number of fans adding their favorite brands to their circles and this amounts to 222,000 fans.

There are 300 million fans for the same brand on Facebook compared to 148,000 on Google +. Brands like IBM,Vodafone and Google have a Google+ page but not an official Facebook page.

The social and search channel gap in Google is closing up as Google is embedding popular product with it’s dominant search marketing position. The brands need to address both channels and it’s now their choice to extend their social presence from Facebook to Google+.

Brands are now offering incentives to include one of their pages as part of their search and social strategy such as the inclusion of Google+ pages in primary search results.There has also been a speculation around this move that it could lead google to anti trust woes.

Including Google+ pages in the search results is a smart move by Google and a recent survey found that Google,Yahoo contributes 34 percent of Facebook fan page referrals.A few questions like whether this could abuse Google’s dominant position in the market if it still contributes further remains to seen.

Tags: brand pages

Business and Brands can now create Google+ pages

The wait is over and today Google+ officially announced the pages for brands and businesses which the marketers have been eagerly anticipating for months.

If “Create a Page” is visited,it’s likely you will be greeted with this message : “but we haven’t finished releasing them to everyone. Please check back soon.” Currently twenty Google+ pages are available and these numbers will increase making it available to all as part of its worldwide rollout.

Google+ Pages are Google’s version of Facebook pages that allow brands to connect with customers and fans.In Google+ pages you can post updates ,communicate with customers or fans and check your +1 counts.A personal Google+ profile is needed to create a Google+ page and you need to pick one of the five categories for your page.

1.Local Business or Place

2. Product or Brand

3.company,Institution or Organization

4. Arts, Entertainment or Sports

5.Others

Google users will be able to find and follow pages like public profiles via Google’s search results.Also, with a Pages admin account, you can use Google+ circles and take part in video chat Hangouts.

Verification Badge Program from Google Plus

A new verification badge program was introduced by Google on Saturday so that celebrities and public figures can verify their identities with a check mark and a small banner that rolls out next to their names.

In the above video Google + team member Wen-Ai Yu speaks about the verification program.The entire program aims to assure that “the people who you are adding to a circle is really who they claim to be”.

Is Google+ female dominated?

It’s hard to believe that Google+,the new social networking site from Google is not a male dominated network. Statistics reveal that Google+ is about to reach 10million users and 33percent of users as of July 14th are female.

The methodology Allen from Ancestory.com in estimating Google+ statistics varies from other Google+ data sources. The data from US Census Bureau is being compared with Google+ users.  By comparing surname popularity in the U.S. with the number of users on Google+ with each surname, he can guesstimate the percentage of the U.S. population that signed up for Google+. We’re not sure how census data can be applied to gender, especially on a social network, but we’ve reached out to Allen for additional information on how his data was composited.

The marketing services from Google has put on a lot of emphasis for women which implies that women are prime target for Google+

Google+ has totally a different interface and I think that users will find time to get adapted to it with especially facebook making a lot of changes.

Tags: Google Plus