Early last week, Google announced the launch of its new Google+ Pages product. With Google+ Pages everything from local businesses to global brands can create a presence within Google+ and begin connecting with their customers and fans.
Buddy Media is very excited to announce that are we are among a small handful of third party companies chosen by Google to participate in a trial for the launch of Google+ Pages.
Buddy Media is relentlessly committed to building world-class enterprise level technology and tools for brands and companies to connect with their customers, engage them and measure success. This partnership allows us to bring our tools and experience powering connections in the social landscape to Google+.
Ultimately, a brand or business needs to be where its customers are. Google+ has experienced tremendous growth since opening its doors to the general public. In just a few short months over 40 million people have created Google+ profiles and use the service to connect with each other and share content. With Google+ Pages and Buddy Media, brands and business are now able to create their presence and begin connecting with their customers and fans.
So, what have we actually built?
We’re excited to announce Google+ Page support for ConversationBuddy, the stream publishing and moderation tool in the Buddy Media product suite. Managing a global community is a full time job for not one, but many people. Tools like ConversationBuddy enable brands to roll out Google+ Page programs at scale within their organizations.
Publishing Content
Sometimes you want to publish content for a product launch or announcement on a weekend or late at night. With ConversationBuddy, you can schedule your posts to go out at your convenience.
Further, ConversationBuddy adds full content approval functionality to Google+ Pages. Want to have a team of people capable of creating unique content but don’t want to give them the power to actually publish this content without an approval? We’ve got that covered.
Maybe you want to create content and seed it to a few dozen Google+ Pages? Using ConversationBuddy, a global manager can suggest content to individual pages and let the page owners decide if it is something they’d like to post.
Moderating Your Conversations
Most of the time your communities are enthusiastic and positive. But from time to time they can be negative as well. With Google+ Pages on ConversationBuddy you can build filters to identify offensive content and alert your team of community managers to take action. You can flag, remove, add notes or just label such content. Maybe it just makes sense to build a filter to look for question marks. Your job is to engage with your customers and ConversationBuddy makes this more efficient on Google+ Pages.
Segment Your Customers
One of the most exciting and important features within Google+ is Circles. Circles are especially powerful from the Google+ Page perspective. Your business may have just a few hundred fans or it could have millions. Publishing content to your entire customer base may work sometimes, but not always. Identifying and segmenting your customer base in to smaller groups can be much more effective.
With ConversationBuddy’s circle management feature, we’ll identify each and every user who has added your business or brand and help you put them in to circles. Maybe you’d like to create a circle for all males living in the United States. We’ll help you build it and then publish content out to that specific circle.
Maybe you want to post content about a new product and add every user who comments on that post to a Circle specific to that product. These people have commented, so they are likely interested in that product. We’ll help you build that Circle so you can communicate future announcements around that product to that segment of folks.
ConversationBuddy circle management helps you have real conversations with the right people.
Measure Success
Of course, very little matters unless you can measure the success of your social actions. With Buddy Media’s analytics dashboard, you can track important KPI’s like new followers, comments, +1’s and re-shares of your content. You can build out your dashboard in the fashion that makes sense for you. Want to see a rollup of all your comment activity? No problem. Prefer to see individual graphs of content engagement by specific circles? You can do that too.
So, how do you get started?
We’ll be rolling this out in the next few days to a few beta clients. If you’re an existing Buddy Media client and you’d like to be considered for early access or if your not yet a client and just want more information, you can fill out this form.
We couldn’t be more excited to work on this project with the Google team. We believe our solution helps build a bigger and more connected ecosystem for businesses and customers and we can’t wait to see how Google expands. We’ll be there every step of the way.
Also, we’re sure you have plenty of questions about getting set up on Google+, and we’re more than happy to answer them. Sign up for one of our upcoming webinars: “How Can Brands Use Google+” at either 9am or 2pm on November 21 and/or November 29.
