Google+ for Small Business: What, Why, When and How

The way in which we communicate with people today is much different than it was only just a few years ago. We keep connected with all of our friends via a computer, a smartphone and tablets. And if someone had told you five years ago they had 500 friends, you would be thinking they’re an egomaniac – but that’s social media. As a digital marketer in this climate, you can’t afford to ignore any of the social media platforms and you can’t be the last one to find out about them. So we ‘like’, ‘follow’ and ‘connect’ with the so-called experts of social media looking to keep abreast of any emerging opportunities so that we can keep justifying our roles with our clients. At the end of the day the hype, it grabs you, you can’t help but be excited about everything that comes out. Put simply, i’m THAT friend. I’ve essentially been peddling Google+ since its launch last July and whilst not doing it publicly so much via this blog, after all some comments can come back and bite you on the bum. Whilst off the topic, did you know that Microsoft said this about the iPhone in 2007 – “[Apple's iPhone] is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good e-mail machine…” Anyway i’ve sat on the fence too long and here is my public stance on Google+, albeit far too late. Google+ : What Google’s main business is search, I don’t think they’ve ever stated otherwise. So their main goal is to provide you the most accurate results for your search in the quickest manner possible. By entering the social media with Google+ they have the opportunity to collect our information from what we ‘like’, what we read, who we trust and more…This gives them more power to provide more accurate results. So Google+ has been described as positioning itself between Facebook and Twitter and I agree in most part. You create your profile and follow your friends, etc. But the difference here is that you can organize everyone you follow in circles. This allows you to share what you want with particular circles. We’ve all reluctantly accepted Facebook friend requests from family or people from work, despite the fact that we know they might see something we don’t want them too.  Google+ circles solves this. Other than that, it’s very much like Facebook but with +1′s instead of Likes. You can even tag people in photos and bring people into a conversation like Twitter but with +JohnCitizen instead of @JohnCitizen. There’s a messenger as well Oh and another cool feature is the Google Hangouts, which allows you to have a video call with other Google+ users. Google+ : Why Google search, it’s really that simple. Google has in only the last week begun rolling out a change to the way they provide us results and it’s called ‘Google...