Google+ Debuts Pages – Gives Businesses a Voice

Update

Google+ Pages are now LIVE. http://plus.google.com/pages/create will now allow you to create a Google+ Page of your own for your brand, business, website or other service. However, please be aware that Google may still be rolling out this functionality to some users. If you still can’t create a Page, let us know in the comments, and try to be patient.

Update #2

We’re pleased to share with you our own brand pages for Livid Lobster and Geek Beat!

• Geek Beat
• Livid Lobster

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Google continues to live up to their promise of rapid updates on Google+, the company’s premiere social network. Today they’re giving us the first look at Google+ Pages, the long-promised business and brand solution for Google+.

Pages can be added to circles, of course. This will make it easy to follow all the brands you could ever want without letting them get in the way of your regular Google+ interactions.

A new feature that should make brands happy is Direct Connect from Google Search.

This is a shortcut to finding Google+ Pages from Google searches. To use their example, if you wanted to find the Angry Birds Google+ page, just type

+Angry Birds

into any Google search box and it’ll take you to their page and give you the option to add the page to your circles.

The one big down side is that it really is just an introduction to the service. Only a few businesses have Google+ pages right now, and attempting to create a new one leads you to this page:

So we have a bit of a wait before we can go around creating pages for customers or fans to interact with us, sadly, but at least Google has proven they’re committed to getting Google+ features out pretty quick. This isn’t the same company that kept Gmail in beta for years before finally taking the beta tag off.

Now that you’ll be able to hang out WITH your favorite coffee shop, not just AT it, let us know what you think in the comments!

(via Official Google Blog)