Google+ Brand Page Concept | Hacker News Reader

Google+ Brand Page Concept

seanpercival.com

36 pointsnextparadigms15 comments

I think these brand pages tend to ultimately destroy the simple experience of interacting with other human beings which services like Google+ are built around. To be honest I'm pretty happy that things don't seem to be going that way, something I talked about on my site in a recent article (http://frog.io/blog/google-plus).

Can somebody explain the purpose behind these "brand pages" on Facebook or Google+?

To me, a stand-alone brand website seems to be much more effective, given the less layout/design constrains.

By having a presence on Facebook, brands can push their message into their followers' streams.

Push instead of pull and social network effects. Once one of these pages convinces you to like/friend/+1/whatever them, they can push content to your screen by having their stories appear in your feed. Additionally, each person they get to like/friend/+1/whatever leads to friends of that friend seeing the relationship established in their feeds, which has all kinds of benefits to the brand.

I agree. I roll my eyes every time I see an add telling me to "Like Colgate toothpaste on Facebook!", as if that were something that anyone would want to do.

And yet 4.5M people 'like' Pepsi on FB...

usually because it's been tied to some incentive.... discount...access to more information/contests..whatever. They're lured in.

A 'like' has become a form of currency in some strange way

Money.

The ideal purpose of a brand page is so that a company can interact/communicate directly with their customers. It may seem frivolous, but people enjoy having direct access to their favorite brands. It's great for getting news about the company, asking questions, and showing your approval of their brand (via the like button). It's not as maleable as a true website, but in our current reality (where everyone is on Facebook), it's clutch.

Facebook and Google+ streams end up serving a similar roll to RSS feeds for many people -- particularly the non-tech-savvy (eg. my parents). The brand pages end up being one of the best ways to push content out to readers.

Of course, this is disappointing to me -- especially when there are good technology solutions to this problem already (eg. RSS). I still use Google Reader extensively, but this seems to be rare even among my tech-savvy friends.

Decent concept, but a very "more of the same" feel to it. There's no need to duplicate brand presence on Google+. My personal interpretation of G+ was that it allows you to filter out the noise and focus on sharing with specific "circles." Seems sort of pointless to try to beat Facebook at their own game considering its fairly rooted at this point. I guess we'll have to wait and see, though.

If G+ doesn't add official company pages, people will just create fake accounts for their companies anyway. Happened on MySpace, happened on Facebook, and it will happen on Google+.

I tend to agree, and I think that G+ really needs to nail these Brand pages and Events (with Calendar integration) to make the most of it. They're off to a great start though.

Please make this not happen for the time being. The point at which brands started using Facebook Page vanity URLs in advertising, instead of their own company domains, was the point at which the internet got a little bit more publicly insane.

hmmm... Looks exactly the same as a facebook brand page.

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