Google Plus Page Set up

byDocDoug

707 followers

6 years ago

Are you one of the many late comers to Google plus? If so its not surprising. The problem with Google+ is the same problem with all things Google -- its annoying completely non-intuitive settings.

How do you do anything in Google? Move your mouse over every square inch and perhaps the invisible settings and menus will pop out of some corner or side edge of the screen. Its really that bad and lets face it, if Google wasn't a monopoly we would not put up with its continual functional failures.

With that minor rant over, we are left with the fact that Google+ is gaining ground quickly as FaceBook use slows down. One of Google's more irritating aspects is also one of its most competitive features -- your ability to access a multitude of useful platforms from a single email sign-in.

This means that from moment one you are forced to choose whether you will set up each of your business websites under a separate gmail or try to include all of them under a single personal gmail. Google wants you to do the latter and doesn't make it easy to separate yourself from your business. I would suggest using whatever gmail you used for WA.

Nonetheless, Google is competing with FaceBook so they have come out with something like the FB business page which is a quasi-website that can be set up specifically for your business. These quasi-websites are somewhat of a quasi-headache because they are website-in-a-box and most of us don't fit into these neatly preconcived boxes. For example, you have to choose your business type from a list and mine is not on there.

Google+ Page is also set up to service brick-and-mortar business as opposed to online despite the fact that street business is struggling and closing while online is growing. While I appreciate the hat tip to small local shops having had one myself, it is worse than myopic to ignore the booming growth of internet business.

There are tutorials on Google+ that say you can choose a category that is not a brick-and-mortar location. This option has not come up for me and I believe that Google has changed or deleated this option.

This means that we need to work around Google in order to use Google+ Page, so lets go. In order to start setting up your business page click here. You can also log in to whatever gmail account you are going to use for your page and hit the Google apps square in the top right corner. Its not on that menu and its not called Google Page (of course) but hit "more" at the bottom of the menu and click My Business.

From here you can set up a simple website-in-a-box for your online biz. The main menu for setting this up is under the three straight lines on the top left. Hit them and a set-up menu pops out of the left side of your screen. There are a few simple themes you can choose which determine main colour, font style and basic layout. For store hours you can choose 24hrs and there is a place to include your biz website address.

Theoretically, you can upload a banner somewhere in the range of 480px X 270px but I never got mine to load right. So I chose a pattern because your default contact info will appear over top of that. Before your site can publish you need a verification code. Google will send you a postcard with this code on it. I requested one late last year and have since given up on it and requested another.

Once your site is published you can reap some significant benefits from it, one of the most critical being sharing. Its easy to share from your Google+ page to your Google+ circles of friends or community, to gmail or to other social media.

Google wants to be the central hub of all your online activities. While I certainly don't use it that way it is very convenient to be able to see my WA notifications in Gmail, nip over to Google+ when a notification pops up, drop a new article on my Google+ Page, share it to other social media, then slip into Google Analytics to check up on my website status all from one log-in.

At the end of the day, having a Google+ Page will help to streamline your ability to get more content onto the internet that points back to your main website. When your traffic increases you can take yourself out for a treat as a reward for having put up with yet another Google product.