Yes, the long-awaited Google+ Pages are finally here and it seems that they will be better than Facebook’s pages. Even if they’re not perfect, they have created a big buzz in social media and users started to have some interesting requests for them. The Google+ team assures us that “a few of your top requests we’ve already started working on, such as multi-admin support, ownership transfer and page analytics.” Their goal and motto is: “Google+ Pages: Have real conversations with the right people”
“Pages are extremely similar to profiles, but they have some key differences:
Pages can’t add people to circles until the page is added first or mentioned.
Pages can be made for a variety of different entities whereas profiles can only be made for people.
The default privacy setting for elements on your page profile is public.
Pages have the +1 button.
Pages can’t +1 other pages, nor can they +1 stuff on the Web.
Pages can’t play games.
Pages don’t have the option to share to Extended circles.
Pages don’t receive notifications via email, text, or in the Google bar.
Pages can’t hangout on a mobile device.
Local pages have special fields that help people find the business’ physical location.”
How Google+ Business Pages could be better than Facebook’s
As Mashable points out in their article, “Google has rolled out a new feature called Direct Connect, which makes it dead simple for users to find and follow brands on Google+ via Google Search. Whenever a user wants to find a brand on Google+, all they have to do is type “+” in Google Search, followed by the brand or business they want to follow. So if a user wants to follow Toyota, they would simply type “+Toyota” in the Google Search box.”
“Direct Connect gives Google+ Brand pages a leg up on Facebook Pages, Twitter profiles and even brand websites. Google is testing Direct Connect with its properties and a limited set of partners (+Google, +Toyota, +YouTube, etc.) but says it will roll out the feature to other brands in the near future.”
As they were also saying in an older article, Facebook lacks “post-click engagement tracking, paid search inefficiencies and has limited customization.” so “converting brands to Google+ will be much easier if Google+ is able to solve this problems.“ Google could offer better search opportunities, better analytics and can learn from Facebook’s mistakes.
”Advertisers drive paid media to their Facebook Pages because they want to be where their audience is, but there’s a major flaw in this strategy. Advertisers can’t track post-click engagement of non-Facebook ads driving to Facebook, and that’s a huge disadvantage in qualifying traffic and uncovering valuable user insights. Without such information, we can only guess whether media dollars are being well spent”
TechCrunch’s opinion
As they point out in their article, “letting brands target updates to demographic subsets of their followers, and providing official app templates that let brands easily assemble their own custom apps rather than going through third-party developers. Being able measure engagement with posts and Page growth is critical to brands justifying allocation of resources to Google+.“
“A better in-line Page creation tutorial could keep brands on Google+ from worrying they’ve screwed up their crucial first steps. Google+ Pages lack custom vanity URLs, though you can assume that’s coming. Multiple admin support is reportedly on its way. The option to assign different roles and privileges for admins such as the ability to publish updates or remove other admins could make Google+ Pages more secure and easier for teams to manage.“
“Direct Connect takes significantly less work than having to visit a Facebook Page in order to Like it. Direct Connect also builds on Google’s dominance in search — something it should exploit in other areas such as email and maps to differentiate its social network.“
Users’ opinions
(expressed in a one of +TechCrunch‘s post)
”Facebook it’s just too confusing to get anything looking decent on your pages! Google + is clean and my experience as a user is better.”
”Google+ has a big growing potential, the target is different of Facebook, and there are people that really want to know, learn, share interesting things, and it is a big plus the arrive of brand pages, everytime Google+ is more complete!, and it has what we are looking for, to have everything in just one place!”
”Google+ is like a chance to start over with social networks. We’ve all learned so much from our mistakes on Facebook… and had to grow with the platform as it made mistakes itself.”
”This is designed with modern social networking in mind, as well as the multi-faceted needs of your “Internet personality”. So I think that Google+ is absolutely fantastic, because people won’t just get caught up in a wave of hype… posts and profiles on here will mean something.”
”I usually find the level of conversation much more involved in Google+. You only have to look at the coherent replies to posts on G+ vs. the short sharp and uninvolved responses on facebook.”
”All I know is that I am enjoying pages on Google+ exponentially better than Facebook Pages (aka spam)”
”I think focusing on business pages is the way that Google is going to drive more people to Google+. I find that with the addition of a dozen new pages my G+ feed has been full of relevant and interesting information. I trust that Google will make pages just as attractive, if not more attractive than Facebook pages.”
”Facebook has just become overloaded with content. Google seems to understand the need to separate features such as games, hangouts, pages etc. instead of it all hitting the feed at once. G+ gives you better options to share content rather than just pushing it all out there.”
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The Google+ is new in the market as some people don’t what is Google+ as the time goes people will come to know and they will start using.Yes the features of Google+ is very different from Facebook.