Google+ and the +1 button: should your business care?

Google+ launched by invitation on June 28 and opened to everyone on September 20. The pieces a business owner needs to understand:

• Circles are how users group the people they follow. Someone can put your business in a "Brands" circle and see your posts in their stream without you seeing their personal updates.
• Hangouts are free group video chats for up to ten people, inside the browser.
• The +1 button appears on search results, ads and, since June, on any website that adds it. A click says "I recommend this" and, since this fall, can also share the page to the user's stream.
• Pages, launched this month, are the business equivalent of a profile. They can post, be circled, and hold their own +1 count.
• Direct Connect lets a searcher type "+" before a brand name in Google search and jump straight to that brand's Page. Only a handful of large brands are enabled so far.

Google says the network passed 40 million users in October. That is fast growth and a small audience, both at once. Most of those users are early adopters: technology people, marketers, photographers and journalists. If that describes your customers, Google+ is already worth more of your time than this article suggests.

This is the part most relevant to a US business right now, and it is worth being precise.

1. It annotates your listing. When someone searches on Google while signed in, and a person in their circles or contacts has +1'd your page, the listing shows that person's name and photo underneath. Google's own testing shows that personal annotations raise click-through, which is a traffic gain without any ranking change.
2. It shows a count. Pages with many +1s display a number on the button. On a product or article page, that is social proof in the same way a Facebook Like count is.
3. It may feed ranking. Google has said it is looking at +1 as a signal and has been deliberately vague. Treat any lift as a bonus, not a plan.
4. It applies to AdWords. The +1 button sits on search ads too, and annotations on ads carry over from the matching page.

What it does not do: a +1 does not create a link, does not help Bing, and does not help searchers who are signed out or who have nobody in their circles.

The button is a few lines of JavaScript from Google's developer site. Points that trip people up:

• Put it on pages you want recommended, meaning products, articles and service pages, not the home page alone.
• Place it above the fold next to your existing share buttons. Below the footer it will be clicked by almost nobody.
• Set the href attribute explicitly to the canonical URL, so +1s on tracking-parameter versions of a page roll up to one count.
• Load it asynchronously. The default snippet does; the older synchronous version slows your page.
• Add the Page's link markup once your Google+ Page exists, so Google can associate the site and the Page.

A Page takes fifteen minutes to create and should be done by someone with access to a company Google account, since the personal profile that creates it is the only administrator for now.

Then add the Google+ badge or a link to the Page on your website, in your email signature and on your Facebook Page. Pages cannot circle people until a person circles them first, so the audience has to come from channels you already own.

The honest view of effort for a typical US business in late 2011:

• Post two to four times a week. Google+ posts can be long and support formatting and large images, so one thoughtful post beats five short ones.
• Reuse with care. Blog excerpts, photos from jobs, and questions to the audience travel well. Links to your own site with no comment do not.
• Try one Hangout a month if you offer advice: a Q&A for customers, a product demo, a quick clinic. It is the feature Facebook does not have.
• Respond to comments within a day. The network is small enough that engagement is noticeable.
• Measure through Analytics. There are no Page analytics yet, so tag links in posts with campaign parameters and watch referrals from plus.google.com.

Do not pay anyone to build circles for you. There are no ads on Google+, no promoted posts and no way to buy followers that will not look like what it is.

The cost of claiming a Page and adding a button is close to zero. The cost of building a real audience is the same as on any network: time and useful posts. Spend the first and be deliberate about the second.

We treat Google+ as one piece of a connected brand, growth, web and technology plan, not a separate project. Discover looks at where your customers already are and how much of your business depends on Google. Plan decides the level of effort from the table above and who owns it. Build sets up the Page, the +1 buttons and the site markup, and prepares a month of posts in your voice. Improve reviews referral traffic and +1 counts monthly and increases effort only when the audience shows up.

A representative engagement is on our launch work: a product launch for a brand whose buyers are early adopters by temperament. We put the +1 button on every product page from day one, created the Google+ Page the week Pages opened, and used Hangouts for launch-week demos while Facebook and search ads did the heavy lifting. Google+ delivered a small but unusually engaged share of launch traffic, and the +1 annotations began appearing in search listings within weeks.