The Pluses of Google+: Why G+ is so Important for Your Business

Bring up Google+ in a conversation and you’ll never hear the end of it. There’s always a strong opinion looming around the topic. Google+ for most people is either 1. a social media gold mine or 2. a ghost town full of user accounts nobody signs into. “Which one is it?” has been the question many people, especially many marketers, have been trying to answer since G+ launched back in 2011. And the answer is all now starting to surface. It would be foolish to ignore Google+ when it comes to online marketing, and here are three good reasons why:

Google’s Past Social History

There’s a lot of talk about Facebook vs Google+ and questions about whether or not Google+ has the power to surpass Facebook as the biggest and strongest social network, but there’s no question about it. Despite that Facebook is much older, Google+ has the skills to play with Facebook on an even playing field, according to this article by PC World. Google collects a massive amount of data about its users who are spending time on other Google properties, such as Gmail, YouTube, Drive, Calendar, etc. and guess what? Google integrates it with Google+.

Hashtag Integration

Did you know that Google will let users search for hashtags? Type in #marketing and you’ll see results relevant to that specific hashtag AND a scrolling widget of real-time related posts on Google+ to the right of your screen. This is all the more reason why marketers should take the time to integrated Google+ into their social media marketing strategy and to incorporate the right hashtags to their content marketing. This content can be easily found and searched for on Google. Google+ will even automatically generate hashtags for content that you post (and if you find that some aren’t relevant, all you have to do is delete them).

Authorship is Vital

Speaking of online content, another big way to get your content found is with Google authorship. By setting up authorship through G+, you have a way to make your content more visible on search engine results and establish authority with Google. As a reward for you, Google will recognize your authority and rank you higher.

If you’re a marketer, there’s no doubt that Google+ is worth placing in your marketing strategy for all the search benefits it provides. Even if Google+ isn’t the strongest in social, it’s still the child prince of the king of search. So why risk losing business through search by completely ignoring Google+?