By Grant Shepherd
When it comes to the major social networking sites, most businesses only bother with the big two: Facebook and Twitter.
This is a reasonable strategy as they are the most popular and therefore your posts or tweets are reaching the largest audience possible. But there is another social network that seems to always be forgotten in many marketing strategies, Google+.
It is understandable why many small businesses underestimate the importance of Google+. It doesn’t have the popularity of Facebook, it has a smaller audience and they are less active on the site. In addition when it launched, Google+ didn’t even offer a dedicated business page option. But things are changing.
Google+ does offer business pages now, and it is something every business needs to establish. Will your page get as many likes as your Facebook profile? Probably not. Will your updates be shared as much as that last tweet you sent on Twitter. Once again, maybe not. But this doesn’t mean Google+ is a useless social tool; it just offers a very different set of advantages.
It is very simple: if your business has a physical address, you need an up-to-date Google+ business page. Why you ask? Because of two other services Google offers: Search and Maps.
Obviously Google wants its social service to take priority over the competition, so it will rank you higher in its search results if you use Google+. Google is still the world’s most used search engine.
If you want your website to rank high in Google Search – and more importantly, higher than your competition – then you should make sure you have as much useful information as possible available. At the very least, you should put your address, hours of operation and a contact phone number.
This is also the case for Google Maps. When a potential customer searches for say ‘best pubs in Sydney’ a list of options will come up.
How are they ranked? Google Maps factors in many aspects, but one of these is your Google+ reviews from customers, and also how up-to-date is your information.
If you don’t have a Google+ page, an inferior pub might rank higher than you simply because they have spent a little effort creating a free profile on the site.
So overall, yes you should devote the most of your social strategy to your Facebook page. It would be careless not to harness that immense user base, but make sure you devote some time to the often forgotten power of Google.
See more on Social Media by Grant Shepherd:
“Giving your customers a voice”