Google has finally launched their business pages feature, and it’s open for everyone to sign up. You can read more about it on the Google Blog, or watch the video below for a quick overview of how it works.
Business pages work very similarly to personal profiles, with a few notes:
- You cannot create an account for a business page; you create it via your personal profile (similar to Facebook).
- You can create multiple pages from a single profile.
- Each business page can only be managed by the profile that created it, so choose carefully the right person in your organization to create the page. Support for multiple admins is “coming soon”.
- Pages cannot add users to a circle unless the user adds them first. This is an awesome anti-spam move by Google.
- There aren’t any vanity URLs yet (like plus.google.com/pepsi), but those are presumably coming in the future.
Direct Connect
Tied to this release is a new feature called “Direct Connect”. If you begin your Google search with a +, it’ll show brand pages that match the query in the auto-complete results, as shown here:
Over time, it’s possible that this could become a trendy thing to promote. I can image someone like Pepsi having something like “Google +Pepsi” for more at the end of a TV ad. If it does take off, it’ll be important to get your page listed there. But how?
Badges
Today, Google released “badges” for business pages. These allow you to add nifty widgets to your page, and people can add your brand to their circles directly from your website! It’s pretty slick.
Even more important is the snippet of code that they have you put in the <head> section of your site. This is there to prove that the page in question is really yours and will qualify you to show up as a Direct Connect option. No word on how soon those will start appearing, but it’d be wise to get yours connected so you can show up in Direct Connect as soon as possible. You can learn more about badges from this Google blog post.
Have you built a page yet?
Have you built a page for your company yet? Leave a link to it in the comments and show us your work!
