With Google opening up its Plus social networking service to brands last week, the question we have been considering is whether it’s worth our time actively using the new brand pages.
Let me say before going any further though, you should definitely reserve a page in Google+ for your brand. It only takes a couple of minutes to register your page and you’ll ensure you won’t get hijacked by brand squatters.
Now, onto the question at hand… is it worth time and investment to create and maintain a fully functioning presence?
We can get an insight into the relative popularity of each service by looking at data from the Share buttons that proliferate across the web these days. We can use this as an indicator of the relative importance of each service.
For our study we looked took a sample of news and tech news websites: BBC, CNN, Guardian, New York Times, The Telegraph, Mashable and EConsultancy. Of those, only the The Telegraph, Mashable and EConsultancy have added Google+ sharing to their site.
Next we took the top 5 stories from each site at the time we did the survey and looked at the number of shares on each service:
Google+ | ||||
Telegraph | ||||
968 | 577 | 54 | 16 | |
60% | 36% | 3% | 1% | |
Mashable | ||||
610 | 5211 | 1684 | 108 | |
8% | 68% | 22% | 1% | |
EConsultancy | ||||
43 | 311 | 39 | 22 | |
10% | 75% | 9% | 5% |
So there you have it, according to our admittedly rather unscientific survey, Google+ represents less than 5% of sharing activity on sites that have a Google+ button, and a much smaller percentage of overall sharing activity given that most mainstream sites do not have a Google+ button.
On that basis we have decided not to spend time maintaining a Google+ page (yet).
Have you created a Google+ page? What results are you getting from it?
Hey Mark I’m glad to see others realize that Google+ at this point has put some business owners on overload with yet another social platform. However, I did get onto Google+ when they first came on line and then got my business page up as well. Right now, I am getting great results from Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook (in that order). So I am in agreement with your statement …. “have decided not to spend time maintaining a Google+ page (yet)”
Thank you for sharing your unscientific survey which provides some interesting stats.
Interesting to hear that LinkedIn gives best results for you Lynn. What approaches are you using there? InMail, QnA, Groups, Adverts? Would be interested to know your experiences in more detail.
The number one thing that I found that has helped me the most on Linkedin is having a 100% complete and fully optimized profile. I have gone from 238 connections to almost 1000 within 3 months. However, these connections are specific to my industry and so when I send out LI inmail, my response rate is huge. (And because of this, I developed a 5 hour online video training program showing business owners how to set up a proper profile.)
Groups is another area that provides an amazing way to build your visibility, credibility and then having people contact me for various opportunites (JV), cross promotion and those looking for help within my area of expertise. There are so many features on Linkedin that I have discovered and am still learning more about this awesome platform. I am now learning Linkedin’s Company pages that is also another great way to showcase your business, services and products.