Google+ Business Profiles Are Here!
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Thu, Nov 03, 2011
Since Google launched “+”, their new social network, organizations have been waiting with bated breath to get set up with company profiles and take advantage of Google+’s marketing potential. Well the good news is, Google+ profiles for businesses are here! There is one catch, though. Google+ profiles for business are only available at the moment to those who use Google Apps for Business. This is a service which costs $5 per month, and you must have a website.
Why limit availability of Google+ profiles for business?
The thinking is that Google would like to slowly roll out profiles for business in order to iron out any bugs in the system. This is not out of character for Google, as known for long and drawn out rollouts. We anticipate that Google+ will rollout profile pages for all businesses in November.
How can I get it now?
For those using Google Apps, the service can be enabled manually from within your Google Apps account. You will have to customize sharing rights etc. This roll out at least lets us know about more about functionality of Google+ profiles for businesses.
Circles work for privacy control, too
If you’ve used Google+ before, you’re already familiar with the use of different circles to control privacy for what you post and share. For business profiled on Google+ the system is the same. Circles can even be set up to share within your organization only, in order to arrange meetings and share content. This is essentially like setting up a mini-social network for your company.
Video conferencing is easy with Hangouts, and conferencing while working on a document is easy when using Google Docs. This is essentially a simple enterprise solution for those who may not be able to afford a full on software installation, and we think it’s great.
Where to from here?
We’re still playing with Google+ profiles for business, so keep a lookout for more posts about this new platform soon.
