Google Says Google+ Is Not Ready For Brands

Ever since Google+ was launched, I am playing around with it both for personal use as well as for professional use. I see Google+ eventually replacing Facebook for me (provided I convince my family and friends to start using Google+ and their throttling of invites is not helping my cause) on the personal side. Already, I am tapping into Circles and Hangout to work with my colleagues, effectively moving from another social tool. I am just waiting for Google to enable Google+ for Google Apps users before I can take advantage of it fully for my business needs.

As it is the case with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter, businesses are jumping into Google+ to establish their brands there and be part of the conversation. But Google is not excited about brands and marketers tapping into Google+ right now. They feel that the current iteration is only suitable for consumers and they are working on building a version suitable for brands and marketers. This should be available in a few months and, in the mean time, they are actively discouraging the businesses from building Google Profiles for their business names or brands. They are also planning to allow limited number of businesses test it out before making it generally available. If your business is interested in testing out Google+ for businesses, you can sign up here.

This information was announced by a Googler, Christian Oestlien, on a Google+ post.

We have been watching Google+ take shape over the last week and we’ve seen some really great companies get involved. But frankly we know our product as it stands is not optimally suited to their needs. In fact, it was kind of an awkward moment for us when we asked Ford for his (or was it her?) gender!

How users communicate with each other is different from how they communicate with brands, and we want to create an optimal experience for both. We have a great team of engineers actively building an amazing Google+ experience for businesses, and we will have something to show the world later this year.

The business experience we are creating should far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses. We just ask for your patience while we build it. In the meantime, we are discouraging businesses from using regular profiles to connect with Google+ users. Our policy team will actively work with profile owners to shut down non-user profiles.

Over the next few months we are going to be running a small experiment with a few marketing partners to see the effect of including brands in the Google+ experience. We’ll begin this pilot with a small number of named partners.

I guess Google has a strategy to effectively monetize the craze of marketing folks towards social networks. With Google finally managing to come out with a decent social tool which has the potential to succeed big, this strategy makes more sense. Let us wait and see how it plays out.