How Google+ Offers More Value than Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest to Small Businesses

With search engine optimization getting a complete makeover, social signals are now more important than ever. Many industry experts have given their verdict that search engines are going to give more value to social presence of a website when determining its rankings rather than the number of backlinks pointing towards it.

Social media presence isn’t a problem with mega-companies, who have tons to spend on social media. However, small businesses can only spend so much, and they’re also limited by the number of staff to handle accounts on social media channels.

Currently, there are 4 social media sites deemed as most important; Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+. A business small in size may not have enough resources to establish a presence on all these channels, so they may decide to target one of them.

So which channel is the most important when it comes to social signals? Is it Zuckerberg’s Facebook with its Likes or the blue bird with its tweets or a repining channel with 80 percent female users? It’s none of them.

With all the changes going on and algorithms surfacing, the most important social media site or channel appears to be Google+.

Google+ offers more value than Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. If you’re a small business owner who would like to know more, here are a few reasons to back the claim.

1.  Posts appear in search engine

The biggest advantage of using Google+ is that Google has linked its results with the native search engine; Google Search. Whoever adds you in their circles, and search for something in Google Search, they’ll be presented with the posts you’ve shared on Google+, provided the posts you’ve made matches their search query.

Here is how it works. A guy who wants to know about iPhone adds you in his circle. You write a post on iPhone on your website or blog, and share it on Google+. When the person who has added you searches for iPhone in Google Search, he’ll be shown your post listed as a result.

This means you’ll have more chances of getting visitors related to your niche.

2.  +1s recommend the web pages

+1 recommend the web pages to the users on the Google+ network. For example, if a user coming from search results +1’s a web page on your small business website, that web page will be recommended to the people added in his/her circles.

This is going to increase the chances of the web page being shared in social media, which in turn leads to more +1s, greater visibility, more circles and ultimately better SEO.

Google+ is also offered as default on most devices running the Android operating system, so users can +1s from anywhere where there is a clear wireless internet service.

3.  Google+ is easy and less competitive

Google+ is easy to operate, as it’s integrated with Gmail, the most widely used e-mail service in the world. It only takes a few seconds to find out what’s happening on Google+, without requiring a separate sign in or authentication.

Currently, Google+ is less competitive compared to Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, so small business owners have a good chance to establish a presence, free of monetary charge, before the community grows.

Facebook is currently pretty expensive, while Pinterest and Twitter require a lot of effort to establish a presence on. Google+, on the other hand, requires less of an effort. Furthermore, the people on Google+ engage and connect more compared to users of other social media sites, which is an advantage, as SEO will not be about building links in the near future; it will be about the relationships.