If you have a Facebook profile, chances are you've "liked" at least a few pages for businesses, people or products. Businesses jumping on the Pages bandwagon has become so widespread it's easy to forget a time when the social network was just for personal profiles.
Google's social network Google+ launched its answer to Facebook Pages last month, and like Facebook's service, it has a lot to offer to small and local businesses.
1. Targeted communication
One feature that set Google+ apart when it launched earlier this year is its Circles feature that easily allows you to filter your posts to different "circles" of connections, whether they be close friends and family, acquaintances or work colleagues.
Just as your personal Google+ profile can have circles of followers, so can pages. Targeting posts to a certain age, gender or location is as simple as adding groups of followers into a circle and selecting updates to only go out to those people before you hit "post." For small businesses, this is a great marketing tool that makes the chances your post is meaningful for your audience a lot higher. Check out Intel's page for an example of targeted posting in action.
2. Accessibility across the Web
No matter how much work you put into your page, it won't mean much unless your audience is finding it. In addition to Google+ pages showing up in Google searches, with Google+'s new Direct Connect feature, adding a simple plus sign to a Google search query is all it takes to take customers right to your page. It's one more thing that can increase the visibility and accessibility of your business.
3. Intimate customer interaction
Perhaps the coolest feature Google+ offers for businesses is its Hangouts service. Customer communication is as easy and straightforward as clicking "Start a hangout" on the side of the page where you can chat with text, voice and video with up to nine of your page's followers. Of course, you can also create a free private hangout among coworkers for the next virtual meeting. Also check out Hangouts with Extras, which adds the beta feature of sharing your screen, and stay tuned for Google to enable pages to share documents right from Google Docs.
While the fledgling service still has room to grow (pages currently can't be accessed via custom short URLs like Facebook pages can, for example) Google+ offers a lot of the standard and even some unique features that can help small businesses market their brands and ease communication within the company, with customers and with their community. It'll be really interesting to see in which direction the search giant takes the service and how its competition responds. One thing's for sure: it's an exciting time for small businesses using social media.