Marketers should be interested in Google Plus' latest feature, a custom Google Plus URL for personal pages, as well as brand pages. This will help you now refer to your Google Plus by its own branded URL, rather than the long string of numbers that previously identified your page. To get rid of that long string of characters and claim your Google Plus URL, however, your page has to pass a short set of rules. After being verified, you're free to get the URL that you desire. Watch today's Daily Brown Bag to learn about Google Plus' latest attempt at making itself relevant in the social networking world, and if it's something you would invest in to acquire.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to The Daily Brown Bag. Today, we’re going to be talking about Google Plus’ recent vanity URL release. I’m Chad Hill and I’m joined by Adam Stetzer.
Yeah, good morning, Chad and welcome to The Brown Bag, everybody. So vanity Google Plus URL release. What are we talking about here? We’re talking about not having a really long Google Plus URL with lots of geeky terms in it, and instead having something like google.com/+friendlyname. This is something that’s not particularly new in the industry, because Facebook and other social media platforms have already done it. Google’s now moving into this territory. Again, they’re trying to make their platform and their social media play a little more attractive. Why should we care about this? Well, 40% of marketers do use Google Plus, ad 70% want to learn more about Google Plus. So, there is an appetite out there for having a stronger presence in this social media platform. Sixty-seven percent plan to increase their activity on Google Plus, so we do see that the appetite is growing. They want to be there, and a friendlier Google Plus URL certainly makes getting to it better and your links easier to share. But, is there any controversy here, Chad?
No, I don’t think so. Well, actually yes there is. There always is. I think deep in the terms of service, there was some disclosure that said, basically, that a vanity Google Plus URL is free today, but it may not always be free. So, Google is leaving itself some wiggle room so that down the road, I guess, it can charge you for a vanity URL. But, I guess the likelihood of them doing that seems pretty low. Who knows? Google may be planning for us all to one day be paying them to verify who we are with authorship and the other things they’re doing.
Right. So, just like vanity license plates, this is something that is sort of a perception thing. It looks a little better, it’s a little cleaner and a little nicer when you share it on your website or put it on your business card. I guess that’s their hope. If they can make this more attractive to marketers who are already doing this on Facebook and other social media platforms, you’re going to want to make your Google Plus more a part of that standard pack of things that you advertise, which has worked for Google in branding themselves to look like a place to be for things other than just search. Of course, we’ve seen the struggle to get out of that box. Everyone knows they’re the king when it comes to search engines, but when it comes to other marketing angles, they’ve really struggled.
So this is yet another of their attempts to break out, and I’ll be interested to see if it takes. We’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Are you interested in a vanity URL for Google Plus? Maybe you could care less. Share that with us. Also, what are your customers saying? Are they asking about Google Plus? Do these stats ring true? Do they want to know more and market there? Please drop those in the comments. We’re here every day doing The Brown Bag, so if you like this video, we hope you’ll subscribe to our YouTube channel.