UPDATE: Now that adding multiple managers to Google+ Brand or Business Pages is active, check out our handy guide “How to Add Administrators to Your Google+ Brand Page.” Also see our listing of all our guides to Google+ for business.
Original Post:
On Google+ marketer Carter Gibson posted bullet point highlights from a talk by Google staffer Tae E. Kim at the CrushIQ conference in Washington DC. You can read his whole post here, but I want to pick up a few points that caught my attention.
Mutiple adminstrators for brand pages coming…in first quarter of 2012.
This is good new/bad news, in a way. The good news is the further confirmation that there will indeed be multi-admin capabilities for Google+ brand pages. This omission probably caused more uproar among page builders than any other missing feature in the initial rollout last week. Some brands even expressed that they were going to hold off on building brand pages because they couldn’t tolerate the risk of having their page be under the control of one person. What if that person leaves the company?
In light of that, the “bad news” is that multi-admin control won’t be here until “some time in the first quarter of 2012.” While that is not all that far away, months can seem like years in the world of social media. According to Carter Gibson, though, it sounds like Google is planning a whole bundle of significant upgrades to Pages, a sort of Pages 2.0, that should roll out together in the new year, a late Christmas gift to us all.
There are such things as “verified brands” and how to become one.
Even though anyone can set up a Page, and many pages can exist with the same name (even trademarked names, apparently), Google has set up a process for Pages to identify themselves to Google as the real deal. Similar to Google’s recent author verification feature, Page verification involves placing either header code with a rel=”publisher” tag and/or a Google+ Badge on your site, while at the same time linking to that site on your Google+ Page. Setting that up is described in our post “How to Verify Your Google+ Brand Page with Google.” Undoubtedly having your Page verified will make it more likely to show up in search results (and by the way, starting today. Google+ brand pages are showing up in regular Google search!).
Another reason why brands are champing at the bit to get verified is to get in on Google’s Direct Connect search feature. Direct Connect allows users to find brands on Google+ within Google search by typing a “+” in front of the brand’s name. For brands that have been admitted to Direct Connect (try “+toyota” on Google), users entering the brand with the plus will be taken directly to the brand’s Google+ Page. Direct Connect is still available only to a choice few brands at this point, but Kim acknowledged that the way to qualify down the road is to have a badge on your site, link from your Page to your site, and accumulate a lot of followers for your Page.
AdWords WILL Be Coming to Google+!
Kim also confirmed that AdWords ads will eventually be shown on Google+, but that Google is in no hurry to do so. Monetization, he said, is not a priority right now. He added that AdWords on Google+ will make use of the Ripples feature, although it is not clear to me how that would work.
What do you think of these coming changes? Do they affect how you view Google+ Pages for your brand? Will you be more or less likely to build a brand page now?
If you are or have built a Google+ Page, don’t miss my “Complete Guide to Optimizing Your Google+ Brand Page“!
