Google launched Google+ pages for brands a while ago. Many Google+ users are confused about ways they can use their pages to drive leads for their businesses. In reality, your approach to Google+ pages should not be that much different from the tactics you use on your Facebook pages. Here are 6 ways you can go about developing a more successful Google+ page:

• Build a killer profile: you can’t expect to achieve a lot of success with your page if you have spent only a couple of minutes putting it together. In order to build a killer page, you should add all the relevant information to it. That includes information about your business and what it offers. Adding photos and videos to your pages is a very good idea as well.
• Promote your page: Google has set some limitations for Google+ page owners. For instance, you can not circle people who have not circled you. That’s why it is so important for page owners to use all their outposts to promote their pages. Don’t forget to add your page badge to your website.
• Offer page specific content: People do not come to your page to see the same content you are sharing in other places. Adding exclusive content to your Google+ page goes a long way towards helping you achieve success with it.
• Vary your content: many Google+ users only add text articles and comments to their pages. You could have an easier time engaging your fans by adding video, graphics, and other types of content to your pages or profile.
• Engage your fans: as a page owner, you do not want to be doing all the sharing. Getting your friends involved on your page is a must. You can always peak their interest by adding questions and provocative discussions to your page. When someone takes time to respond to your posts, you should reply back.
• Give your visitors incentive to stay connected: in the past few weeks, I have seen people who have used giveaways and contests to get the word out about their Google+ profiles. The same approach can be used for pages. Just make sure you don’t violate Google’s guidelines.

Building a killer Google+ page does take a bit of time and effort. The above steps should help you get on the right track.

What tactics are you using to promote and enhance your presence on Google+?

In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google’s other products) that we hope you love. Second, we’re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.

This is exciting news for those of us who are addicted to Google+ and Reader. Google has done some slick jobs with its latest product redesigns. This one sounds to be another exciting project. In order to bring Google Reader and Google+ together, the company will do some cleaning up. Google is also expanding its Reader’s export feature for those who choose to ditch the service. You will be able to export:

• subscriptions
• shared items
• friends
• likes
• starred items

No word on how the design will look like.

Those of you who have been around WordPress for quite some time are familiar with the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Hosting your own WordPress website gives you more control but it has its disadvantages too. The WordPress team has decided to offer “self-hosters” the best of both worlds with Jetpack:

Our users have been banging down the door for this. Every time we launch something new on WP.com the first question is always asking how people can get it for their self-hosted blog. Now you can have your cake and eat it too — host your own blog, completely under your control and with the freedom of the GPL, and still get all the cloud goodies of our hosted service. It’s the best of both worlds, the decentralized and the centralized, the control and the convenience, the peanut butter and the chocolate.

JetPack will feature a set of plugins that WordPress users can take advantage of to take their blog to the next level. Essentially, JetPack connects users to cloud-based features offered on WordPress.com. Here are the plugins that will be available in the initial release:

Gravatar Hovercards: Find out who’s commenting on your posts with enhanced information for Gravatars (includes full name, bio, other web profiles).

WordPress.com Stats: Keep on top of your traffic with powerful and simple to understand statistics for your site.

Twitter Widget: Keep your readers more up to date by syncing your tweets to your site via a simple widget.

Shortcodes: Quickly add movies, images, and more to your posts and pages with a single line of code.

Shortlinks: Automatically creates an easy to copy/paste mini-url for any post on your site.

: Use the famous markup language to quickly create beautiful mathematical expressions and equations.

Sharedaddy: Your readers can easily share your posts via email or their favorite social networks.

After the Deadline: Your writing will improve thanks to this artificial intelligence based spell, style, and grammar checker.

JetPack is expected to remain free for now. But the folks at WP do not rule out charging for some features in the future. Thanks to WordPress partners, JetPack will be available through multiple web hosts from the get go.

Have you installed JetPack already?

The Daily is the latest attempt by Rupert Murdoch to  breathe a new life into his publishing business. It is an iPad exclusive daily newspaper that brings text, audio, and video content right to your tablet. The paper appears on your iPad every morning with plenty of content to get you through your day. The app does have a very attractive interface and does show the potential for Magazine 2.0 concept. But who needs The Daily when you can use your Facebook and Twitter accounts to keep up with the news more effectively. Here are just 3 tools that let you do just that:

Flipboard: a social magazine for iPad that keeps you informed on the updates posted by your friends on Twitter, Facebook, and other online sources.

The Early Edition: may not be as dynamic as The Daily, but it does allow you to add your own RSS feeds and turn them all into a virtual newspaper.

Google Reader: Google Reader needs no introduction. One can easily at hundreds of RSS feeds to it and keep track of them all on their computer. One can access Google Reader from tablets too. Who needs The Daily when you have Google Reader?

We have not even scratched the surface here. Who needs a newspaper and someone else to edit your news for you when you can be in control with the above tools.

Sprouter gives startup owners access to a list of events and topics they can keep track of. They can always share their status with the world, ask, and answer questions.

The Q/A part of this community is very powerful. Considering that Sprouter is designed for entrepreneurs and startup owners, the audience is much more targeted for start-up related questions, pitches, and everything in between. Just like on Twitter, users can follow and get followed by others in this community.

Sprouter has been around for a while. I did have a chance to work with a competitor of Sprouter in 2007. While many of the players from those days are gone, Sprouter is still kicking. Well worth being a part of if you are in the start-up business.

Users can take advantage of this search engine to go through conferences by name or by place. It’s also possible to use this service (in conjunction with a Twitter account) to find which conferences your tweeps will be going to.

If you are into speaking at conferences, you can use this service to let others know about your future events (and build a track record for yourself). You can even get your books listed on this website. Lanyrd is not perfect, but it’s a very helpful service for those looking for more conference to participate in. It can save you time searching for events in your area.

Apple’s Ping may not be as formal as LinkedIn or even Twitter, but it is based on a powerful concept. It is very easy to connect with other people who support the same artists and love the same kind of music.

CNET’s Chris Matyszczyk hits it right on the head:

At this point, it is too early to say how Ping is going to be helpful to businesses and those interested in using social networks for more than just pleasure. Make no mistake about it. Ping is a very niche social network of real people with real interests. The concept behind the network is a tad bit different from Twitter and Facebook and allows for more “real” relationships. Whether that leads to success for Apple remains to be seen.

Good Noows not only lets you keep track of your favorite website, but it also can accept your own RSS feeds too. So you can customize the information displayed on your front-page. You can even create new news sections (think of it as categories or folders) and add your favorite feeds to them. I also love the fact that you can customize Good Noows layout easily.

As you can see in the above screen-shot, you can add new sections as well as new sources of information to your account. You get plenty of layouts to choose from too. The service lets you change the font size and translate your news to a language that you can understand (if English is not your first language). You can also share your favorite stories right from your front-page.

I would not use this service as my main RSS reader. But it is an invaluable tool if you want to identify stories that are worth reading quickly. The service needs a bit of work and hopefully more features will be added to it in the future. The concept is awesome though.

Twitter’s status site was full of news about the state of the network (most of which were not good news).

Twitter has gotten much better these days when it comes to handling the load that it gets from all the tweeters. But it has ways to go to become perfect in that regard. Perhaps what’s more distressing is seeing so many people complain about what they can’t do when Twitter should be used as a tool and not a life-style.

Twitter may be struggling from time to time to keep up with all the traffic that it gets. But that is not going to stop the team from implementing new features. Twitter is in the process of introducing its own URL shortening feature that will not only help users save some characters, but it will reduce the chances of people getting scammed on Twitter.

I don’t know about you, but I will continue supporting third-party URL shortening services out there. It’s never ideal if one company is handling all your data, even if Twitter can use your data to improve its features. Twitter may not be perfect, but it does not have to be. Twitter being down for a few hours should not alter your strategy much anyway.

Credit: Web Pro News

Web Pro News has discovered that some Facebook page owners are seeing the “promote” feature show up next to their status updates. The process seems to be pretty straight forward. Once you click on the promote link, you are going to have to go through a wizard, which will include you approving how much money you want to spend promoting your page and who you want to show it to. From there, you can expect traffic to flow to your pages.

Online marketers are already taking advantage of Facebook to promote their pages. Some argue that advertising will take away from Facebook experience. But advertising is going to be the future of Facebook. That’s how the company has managed to stay afloat while Twitter and other services still struggle to come up with a proper business plan.

Promoting your page status updates is another easy way of increasing traffic and interactions on your Facebook pages. Of course, you want to make sure you spend enough time to optimize your Facebook pages. This latest move by Facebook could be just a test, but we have heard similar stories about Twitter. There is no question we’ll be seeing similar attempts in the future.

Your thoughts: are you against more ads on Facebook?