Last month the highly anticipated Google+ beta invitations went out and people rushed to join the latest social network phenomenon. Soon, many were asking, what’s the big deal?
Is this YASN?—yet another social network? People already have a lot of time invested in building Facebook and LinkedIn networks, do they really need to do it all again on Google+?
More than 25 million people have signed up for Google+ – including all of us at The David James Agency – and those are only the ones who have received an invitation. As Shel Holz pointed out in his Aug. 11 blog (Don’t Wait for Brand Pages to do Business Communication on Google+), “that’s 25 million people who fit the early adopter profile—you’d be nuts to ignore the opportunity to reach out based on what we know about marketing to early adopters.”
In order to take advantage of this new opportunity, it is necessary to think differently about Google+ as a social media outlet than Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Many businesses have jumped on the bandwagon to leverage these sites for marketing purposes because it has been done successfully and certainly provides a way to dialogue directly with customers. But Facebook and Twitter were built for personal, social interaction and LinkedIn as a business and employment networking site. Turning a basically personal social medium into a B2B marketing tool has limits.
Google+, on the other hand, is an opportunity to craft a social site concept from the ground up to fit the needs of the business marketing community as opposed to trying to retrofit a social interaction tool for marketing purposes.
Here are some key ways that businesses can build a Google+ site into a great marketing tool.
Circles
Circles is the main advantage of Google+. Circles provides an easy way to group connections by commonalities and choose what content goes to which Circle(s). As a business marketing tool Circles has great potential. Almost every employee, from company executives, marketers and sales folks to support staff, order fulfillment and others, can build Circles for, and share information with, targeted groups of customers, suppliers, partners, prospects and even other employees.
Sparks
Sparks is another feature that has great potential for marketing, possibly even more so than for personal interaction. Sparks enables users to search topics and find relevant articles, videos and photos and share with their Circles. Sharing the latest industry news and analyst and editor views as well as company and new product information, even videos, with customers is a great way to maintain an ongoing relationship and dialogue. And because it can be targeted by Circle, users can be confident the content they are sending out is relevant to each person to whom they are marketing. They can even stay in touch with former and prospective customers in a way customers will appreciate and at the same time reminds them their vendors are out there, staying on top of trends and news that matters to them.
Mini blogs
Everyone has struggled with the 140-character limit on Twitter, but few are aware that there is a 400-character limit on Facebook. Google+ has no character limit on posts, so there is much more freedom to share mini blogs with different groups. Most people don’t want to read someone’s personal diatribe on Facebook, but in a business setting people grouped around targeted topics will be interested in a business’s thought leadership and there is vast opportunity to form community forums to discuss topics ranging from industry issues to new product features.
So if your target market is early adopters, jumping into Google+ right now may make good sense. Mainstream B2B marketers may want to wait, though, until Google+ shows it can attract more users.