Social media signals have become more important in recent years for websites. Search engines use the noise created on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+ in their algorithms. I’m not really a fan of fan pages and all that kind of stuff that goes along with it. The core reason here is that I do not really know what to post, considering that I already post here on Ghacks directly.
Google yesterday has launched Google+ Pages, an addition to their Google Plus networking service that allows anyone to create pages. This works similar to Facebook Pages. I have created a Ghacks Technology News page on Google+ and would like to ask anyone here on Ghacks to help promote it. You can access the page here.
The page, from the looks of it, looks very much like a standard Google+ profile.
Here is what you need to know about Google+ Pages. I will explain how you can create your own page and what you need to do if you have a website.
You can create a new Google+ page by clicking on the “Create a Google+ page” link in the lower corner of the right sidebar. The link currently is displayed below the Hangout module.
You need to pick a category for your page. Google currently sorts pages into five categories: Local Business or Place, Product or Brand, Company, Institution or Organization, Arts, Entertainment or Sports, and Other.
Depending on the selection made, you need to fill out different kinds of information. Local Businesses for instance need to select their country and primary phone number, products or brands a page name, website, category and visibility.
Once created you are asked to select a profile photo for the page and post about the page on your “user” stream.
Webmasters who create a page for their website business are encouraged by Google to link from their Google+ page to their website and vice versa. While it is relatively easy to link from Google+ to the website, it is not as easy the other way round. Google asks webmasters to use the rel=”publisher” tag when linking from their web property to the Google Plus page. This identifies the user as the publisher and is likely used for verification purposes.
Additional information about this process are available here on the Google Help site.
Only the page creator can post on the page at this point in time. Other users can comment on posts, but there is no option right now to authorize other users to make posts directly on the page. According to Google, this will change in the coming weeks.
I have a few ideas for the Ghacks page which I would like to briefly describe.
- Post stories that are interesting but do not fit on Ghacks.
- Tech Help for users. This is somewhat limited right now due to the fact that only I can post there. Users could send me private messages and I post their requests on the page. Could mess up the page on the other hand if I’d get lots of requests.
- Do a daily or weekly “best of” stories from other sites that I read.
If you have other ideas let me know. I really like the best of idea.
Oh, and if you could +1 the page and put it in one of your circles, I’d be eternally grateful :)
Oh, and here is the official announcement by Google.
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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