Google to Businesses: Don't Use Google+ (Yet)

Posted 07/08/2011 at 5:35am | by Paul Lilly

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Twitter isn't just about tweeting what you had for lunch, and there's more to Facebook than 'poking' your friends and growing your farm. If you're a business owner, social networking is a great tool for promoting your brand, and at some point, Google+ will join the fray. For the time being, however, Google is asking businesses, universities, and other organizations not to bother with its social networking service.

"Right now we're very much focused on optimizing for the consumer experience, but we have a great team of engineers building a similarly optimized business experience for Google+," Christian Oestlien, product manager for Google+, said in a YouTube video. "We are very excited about it and we hope to roll it out later this year."

Oestlien said the business version will include things like rich analytics and the ability to connect a business profile to other parts of Google, such as AdWords.

"We will be doing some testing," Oestlien said. "We're going to take a small group of brands, businesses, and other entities and create profiles for them and see how users interact with them via circles, through the stream, and even how they communicate through hangouts."

In the meantime, Oestlien asked businesses to refrain from creating consumer accounts, warning that Google+'s policy team will actively work with profile owners to shut down non-user profiles.