Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 11

Viewing Google through a Different Lens

In This Chapter

Looking at Google+ fundamentals

Understanding how to use brand pages

Using tips and tricks

Discovering Google Music

A year or two ago, a chapter covering Google wouldn’t have been needed in a book on social media marketing. But because Google has done so much in the last year and has plans to do so much more in the next, a chapter on Google is indeed now warranted.

Google+ launched in June 2011. Brand pages were added to the platform in November. Google created a social music service and designed a Google button for usage on other websites and for integrating various social features into Google Search. Arguably, Google’s social ambitions are much greater than its realities today (Google+, for example, has approximately 540 million users compared to Facebook’s billion plus users), but that doesn’t mean the future may not look different.

Looking at Google’s Social Strategy

To know how to harness the Google web ecosystem for social media marketing, you need to first understand the core of Google’s own social strategy. ...