Google+ Pages: connect with all the things you care about
In life we connect with all kinds of people, places and things. There's friends and family, of course, but there's also the sports teams we root for, the coffee shops we're loyal to, and the TV shows we can't stop watching (to name a few).
Context & Ripple Effects
When Google launched the Google+ project in June 2011, it was built around person-to-person sharing through circles; five months later, the network is opening its doors to non-human members. Google+ Pages let businesses, brands, sports teams, and media properties be circled the way friends are, turning a contacts product into a follower graph.
The move also closes an old loop: Google Friend Connect in 2008 tried to connect site owners with their audiences and was eventually wound down, so Pages represents Google's second attempt at the brand-audience relationship — this time inside its own social network rather than on third-party sites. Trade press picked the story up immediately, with Search Engine Land framing it as Google+ 'now open' for business.
First-order effects
- Brands and local businesses gain an official presence on Google+ overnight, able to accumulate followers in circles instead of being limited to personal profiles that violated the network's real-name orientation.
- Users get a single place to follow the teams, shows, and shops they care about alongside their friends, deepening daily reasons to return to a network whose engagement Google has been trying to establish since June.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's Pages product and Twitter's follow model now have a direct competitor backed by Google's distribution, forcing both to defend advertiser relationships at exactly the moment brands were deciding where second social budgets go.
- Brand participation gives Google a new stream of identity and interest data that can feed its ad targeting and +1 signals, raising the stakes of the social layer beyond the network itself.
Third-order effects
- If brand adoption holds, social networks consolidate around whoever owns the brand-consumer graph, and Google's bet is that search intent plus social identity beats Facebook's friend graph for commercial connection.
- The pattern points toward every major platform treating businesses as first-class citizens of the social graph — a structural shift from social software as peer communication to social software as marketing infrastructure.
The trend: Social networks are expanding from person-to-person graphs to brand-consumer graphs, with Google challenging Facebook's Pages dominance by wiring businesses directly into its search-and-identity stack.