When Google first opened Google+ to the public, they tried their best to dissuade people from creating accounts for business and organisations, promising that something would be available soon to meet those demands. Now we have Google+ pages and they are a bit like Facebook pages (big surprise).

In the spirit of discovery, I’ve created a Google+ page for this website, so far there’s not much difference between a Personal Profile and a Business Page though who knows what’s lurking in the Google+ Labs with the anti-Zuckerberg security measures.

The Business pages, like Facebook pages have a nice “getting started” section when you first create them. This guides you through the early stages of getting up and running and Google have also provided a downloadable guide to getting started.

It will be interesting to see the social analytics for Google+ pages when they are available and the gradual release of various new APIs allows us to speculate what will be possible over the coming months. It’s going to be an interesting time filled with exciting new ideas and tired re-hashing of stuff that’s been seen hundreds of times before; but that describes pretty-much any point in the last ten years of the web.

People are always quick to judge whether new social media platforms will live or die. I think that we need to keep an open mind on Google+ for business. Google can afford not to rush things and the last thing they’ll want to do is disrupt the loyal user base for any of their other products, but those google fans are exactly the sort of people who will be best served by Google+ as the products that they already use are gradually integrated into the platform.