5-Ways Google+ will influence your 2012 Internet marketing plans –

Has your small business established a business page on Google+? If you haven’t, I’d encourage you to consider Google+ as a new marketing year approaches. With over 40 million users and growing, Google+ has definitely emerged as a powerful player and will undoubtedly be an influencer with your Internet marketing plans for 2012.

What is Google+
Google+ allows businesses to create pages and develop relationships with prospects and customers on multiple levels. Individuals can add a brand to a specific Google+ Circle, share a Google+ page, and interact with the content posted by that company.
But what really sets Google+ apart is definitely video chat.

With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web, and the phone.  

Connect through video –
Hangouts enables companies to engage with fans, prospects, and customers through video conference calls. As Dennis Troper, Product Management Director, Google+ Pages wrote: “We want to help you make the same kinds of lasting connections with your customers online the way you can in real life”. We’ll see.

5-Ways Google+ will influence your 2012 Internet marketing plans –
We’ve picked out a few ways Google+ will influence how you will get traffic from Google’s search engine, whether by boosting your position in search results, increasing the chances that people will click into your site, or other factors.

Here are a few Google+ page samples –

Google+  Ford Motor Company has always been an early adopter to social media.

Google+ Red Bull moves images through their landing page –

Google+ Mercedes-Benz

#1: Google+ intelligence keeps getting smarter –

The more information you provide through the interactions you create, the more ‘enhanced’ information Google+ banks. Google+ offers a lot of elements that will allow Google to understand trends and what people are interested in, faster than ever before.  

#2: Google+ improves search results quality –

Spammers are spotted far more easily than in the past. When Google sees a profile that only shares and votes for things on one website and nothing else, it knows who to target as a spammer.

#3: Google+ is changing how you get traffic –

Google’s +1 buttons appear in Google’s search results and can be embedded on other websites as well. They are tied to a destinations page address, just like shares or tweets are.

HubSpot provides some interesting research results. To determine the value of Google’s +1 button, they gathered data from their entire database of 5,000. They compared referral traffic levels from websites that have the Google +1 button installed against those that don’t. The result? Websites that use Google’s +1 button generated 3.5 times more traffic from Google+ than websites that don’t have the button installed.

#4: Google+ improves click-through rates–

One of the most powerful ideas behind the +1 votes, is that if you can see that certain results are extremely popular, or that people found a specific resource particularly helpful, you have that information available without even clicking into the site. You can see that 100’s of people have already found a certain page useful before you ever click or read any other details about it.

#5: Google+ connects quickly –

Users who want to find a company’s Google+ page can now simply add a “+” in front of the company name in Google.com search to go directly to a company’s Google+ Page and skip over the traditional search engine results page. Get this working for your small business right away! Install the Google+ Direct Connect code on your business website to help verify that your Google+ page is the official page for your business.

Now it’s your turn. Has your small business found a place on Google+? If not, are you planning to include Google+ in your Internet marketing plans for 2012? Let us know, we’d like to hear from you.

Here are some resources that you might find helpful:
http://slidesha.re/p8UbM4
http://slidesha.re/ottu0d