It’s official: Google’s answer to Facebook is finally here with the launch of Google+ Brand Profiles. There’s only one major problem with that: Google+ is not Facebook. Scrawl those four words on a Post-It and stick it on your monitor or iPad until you memorize them. That’s the first step toward mastering Google+ for marketing.
This may be hard to believe. Google+ has been billed as a Facebook killer, its user homepage layout borrows heavily from Facebook, and now there are free self-service branded pages for marketers similar conceptually to what Facebook introduced in November 2007 – almost four years ago to the day. Despite all of this, Google+ is different. This is largely because Facebook the company has only one eponymous flagship product, and Google the company is using Google+ as both a networking hub and a social layer across its diverse suite of digital products.
