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+?

If you have started a Google+ page for your business, you should also take time to connect your page to your website. Google has made the process easy by providing this amazing tool:

In order to use this tool, just provide the long number in your Google+ page URL to this tool. Grab the appropriate code and install it on your site. There are two parts to the code. You should insert the first section in your site header. The second part of the code goes where you want your Google+ button to show.

In order to have a successful Google+ page, you need to have a real content strategy. Connecting your G+ page to your site is a good place to start though.

Google+ Search: the best way to find interesting content on Google+ is by tracking your favorite keywords. By doing that, interesting content won’t ever be more than a couple of clicks away.

What’s Hot: Google is constantly improving Google+. What’s Hot is a cool section on Google+ that lets you find stories that are getting a lot of attention in the community. You can make interesting connections and finding super stories in this section.

Google+ Circles: Circles are quite powerful if used the right way. If you take time to organize your circles and add the right users to them, you will have an easier time finding interesting stories on topics that interest you.

Google+ is quite a vibrant community. With all the content being shared on Google+ every minute, there is no excuse for not having interesting content to share/re-share.

Being involved in the social media is more than just writing about what you have had for lunch or posting your blog articles to Twitter and Facebook. You want to be part of the community and participate in a meaningful way. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give your readers on your blog a chance to help make your blog posts go viral. That’s why having proper social media buttons before or after each and every post is essential. If you happen to run your blog using a CMS such as WordPress, you are in luck. Plugins such as Digg Digg make it so easy to pick and choose what social networks you want to target and add their buttons to your posts fast.

There are three things that you need to consider to get the most out of your social media buttons. You want to make sure you are choosing the buttons that apply to your niche, are displaying them in the right place, and are using a design that doesn’t take away from your stories. That’s what you can accomplish with Digg Digg easily. This plugin enables you to choose the social networks you want to take advantage of on your blog and the site sections you want to display them on. You can even choose the compact model to save some space on your blog.

The plugin is very flexible as it allows you to choose whether you want to display your buttons in a table or as a list. You can stack them together horizontally and vertically. If you are into coding, you can go beyond the options provided in this plugin and pick and choose what you want to display in each and every section of your website.

Digg Digg won’t make your content any better. It just helps you promote your content more effectively with the help of your visitors. The hard work still needs to be done by you.

Google is now going to start grabbing information from your favorite social networking sites that you have listed on your Google Profile. This is exciting on two fronts. On the one hand, you are going to be able to keep up with the latest developments in the world of social media. So you can catch the latest news and developments faster through Google Search. On the other hand, your results are going to be somewhat customized for you. It’s not personalized search just yet, but it’s a very good start.

In case you missed it, Microsoft is also trying hard to get a lead in this department to put pressure on Google. But the latest announcement by Google should stop a bit of momentum that Microsoft was going to make by taking Bing social. The move will certainly marry social media optimization and search engine optimization. Now you can share images, videos, text blogs, and so on across multiple networks and gain a lot more traffic from Google as well.

The future of search is social. It’s all about user generated content mixed with corporate content. It’s about time Google and Microsoft paid attention to all the content created by social media users on a daily basis. We are still in the early days of true social search. But too hard not to get excited about it all.