Google recently introduced Business & Brand Pages for Google Pages +. What may seem like Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook Pages offers much more than that.
Its Google’s attempt to become the Blackberry™ of the social web.
To say that the Blackberry™ smartphone has been unable to keep up technologically with the Apple iPhone is an understatement. However, Blackberry™ is still the weapon of choice for businesses for a variety of reasons.
Google’s latest venture into social media, Google + Business Pages, is Google’s attempt to carve out the same path as the Blackberry™, to become the social media choice for businesses.
How do they intend to do it?
According to Google:
People search on Google billions of times a day, and very often, they’re looking for businesses and brands. Today’s launch of Google+ Pages can help people transform their queries into meaningful connections, so we’re rolling out two ways to add pages to circles from Google search. The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect.
By introducing Pages into their search results, they force businesses to join the tribe or get left behind.
According to Pamela Parker from Search engine Land, ” When businesses create a Page on Google+, they can link the page to their web site URLs and also to their AdWords account. When that’s done, +1s for any of the linked URLs — on web sites or landing pages for AdWords ads — will all accrue to the brand, making the numbers much larger. Previously, +1s were specific to individual URLs and only accumulated when people +1ed the URL in organic results or an AdWords ad that used that URL as a landing page.”
In other words, it offers more opportunities to build brand reputation and that is where Google search results have been heading for some time now.
For all the hype about social media, for many businesses, its still all about search and as Comscore points out in their latest report, Google still rules the that kingdom with over 65% market share.