We’ve been slow to adopt Google + pages as an additional channel but recent developments have made us experiment with pages for ourselves, Nanny Cay and one of our web sites CaribbeanRegatta.com.
Google + is not as big as facebook, it only has 100,000,000 users versus facebook’s 800,000,000 :), but we have been spurred on by two very relevant nuggets of information:
1) Facebook is now actively reducing the reach of pages and in a bid to encourage paid distribution. In a sales deck obtained by Ad Age that was sent out to partners, facebook states plainly: “We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site”. Additionally, marketers are told they should consider paid distribution “to maximize delivery of your message in news feed,” cites AdAge. Pretty clear – pay to have your posts to seen on facebook.
2) SEO – There are a number of SEO reasons for curating active Google + pages – it is Google after all – but the most compelling for us at this stage is that the posts are crawled and indexed almost immediately.
The most interesting result so far is the increase in search rankings for CaribbeanRegatta.com. Searching for the Big 3 Caribbean regattas – “Antigua Sailing Week”, “Heineken Regatta”, and “BVI Spring Regatta” the Google + page is now on the first page for each search term – something we hadn’t achieved to date with web site SEO, twitter and facebook. Interesting that it’s the Google + page and not the website itself… but we like the the logo inclusion!
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