GooglePlus - An Ally of Small Businesses

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The new kid on the block, GooglePlus, has been making leaps and bounds of progress over the past year and is slowly emerging as one of the favourite hot spots for marketing. It has the potential to become the next big thing as far as social media is concerned. Everybody should be on GooglePlus; small business in particular. If you don't, you risk being left behind.

Fast growing social media site

GooglePlus is one the fastest growing social network at present. It might not have a reach as vast as Facebook yet with just over 400 million users compared to Facebook’s formidable user base of 1 billion. But what is notable is that while Facebook has grown at the rate of about 100 million users per year, GooglePlus has a growth rate nearly 4 times that of Facebook. Although only a quarter of these users are still active on GooglePlus, its user base is growing quickly and with that the number of active user is also growing. Something that is ought to be taken advantage of.

GooglePlus in search results

You might have noticed that Google is increasingly showing results with head-shots  These are just Google's way of saying thank you to those individuals that already have a GooglePlus account.  Any posts from an author in GooglePlus rank higher. These authors can benefit from Google's algorithms. These posts also get clicked on more because people tend to think that these are trusted individuals and industry experts. While some other social signals can also create similar results, the whole process gets easier with a simple GooglePlus account. Make sure that your small business website design includes a GooglePlus badge to ensure a prominent place in SERP

Google reviews

GooglePlus allows its users to write reviews on Google. These reviews have a high level of accountability. This is because firstly you can be 100% sure that the reviews have come from actual people and not aliases. Secondly, you can certain that people write truthful reviews because these reviews will be available to public on their feed.

Google Places for business

A vast majority of businesses generally cater to locals. Google has provided an excellent arena for these businesses through their local search result that derive from their map results. Small businesses can open up a profile for free and take advantage of free advertisements on GooglePlus. In addition to this, there are also other attractive options such as reservation tab for restaurants, links for menus, review points and much more.

Google is constantly employing new techniques and methods to rope in more people into using their plethora of products. It is also quite evident that Google will be favouring more qualified users in their search results just to have better accountability. Also personal connections in the search results add to the user experience and allowing users to influence search results will only ensure that the GooglePlus user base will continue to grow. If nothing else, the one thing that is obvious is that the growth will continue over the years to come as far as GooglePlus is concerned. It is your choice to decide if you want to grow with Google or get left behind.