Talk about stealing a page from Facebook: on Monday Google announced that businesses and brands can now set up their own pages on the Google+ social network. 

This move has significant implications not only for engaging your community and building your brand, but also for how people find and share news—or news professionals…

By Amy Gahran

Previously, only individuals could present a coherent presence on Google+—to the consternation of several tech blogs and news organizations.

Now, several news brands (ranging from Oakland Local to Anderson Cooper 360 and The New York Times) have already created Google+ pages.

While many journalists use Google+ via their personal profiles, at this very early stage few appear to have set up Google+ pages to promote themselves as individual professionals yet. But other media pros, such as author Jan Kabili, are doing this.

Just now I created my own (and so far, very basic) Google+ page intended to help brand me as a media professional: Amy Gahran, Media Geek. It’s a work in progress. If you want to help me kick the tires on this tool, please add that page to your circles on Google+.

It’s not yet clear whether Google’s recent move to highlight journalists’ Google+ profiles via Google News will allow journalists to link to their Google+ page instead of their profiles. But if Google does offer that option, that might be the best approach. Stay tuned on this.

Background on Google+ pages:

• How pages differ from profiles on Google+.
• Search Engine Land’s Google+ pages overview.

Getting started:

• Create your Google+ page.
• Mashable and Search Engine Land have published tutorials.
• BreakingNews.com has started a discussion on best Google+ pages practices for news orgs.
• More tips from Google.

CAUTION: Before you create a Google+ page for your organization or brand, make sure the person creating that page will also be the primary page administrator.

According to Search Engine Land:

“At first, whoever creates the page initially will also be the page administrator. No one else will be able to admin that page after them, at first. Nor can that page be transferred to someone else. Multiple administrator support is promised in the near future—but until it arrives, it seems important that if your company has a social media manager, that person should be the one to create the account.”

Should you have a Google+ page?

If you value search visibility—and most media brands and professionals should—it probably makes sense to use this tool. ZDnet sums this up:

“By linking Google+ Pages with basic web search, Google gives itself the advantage over social competitors and other search engines. ...And think for a moment about all of the other Google properties and how they might interact with these new Google+ pages. Google owns YouTube and, aside from the embedding videos into Google+ posts, you can imagine that Google+ Pages and YouTube channels might soon become chummier.

“Likewise, I imagine that Google+ Pages might soon find themselves ‘localized’ and built into Google Maps results. Better yet, as a powerhouse with its Android mobile OS, it’s not hard to imagine that Google+ pages would get wrapped into location-based services.”

Looking forward, Google’s new “direct connect” feature eventually will help make Google+ pages very easy to find via Google searches. If you’re creating a Google+ page, this is probably something you should set up.

Search Engine Land’s Greg Finn explained how to implement direct connect for your Google page. He noted: “Right now, only a few pages actually have Google+ Direct Connect including YouTube, Toyota and Google itself. While only a few have it, Google+ Direct Connect shows up in the administrative back-end of all pages.”

It’s also possible to create multiple Google+ pages—which could be useful if your organization has sub-brands (such as zoned editions of a metro newspaper), regular beats or sections that attract their own community, or special campaigns or programs.

Even if you’re not sure how you would use a branded Google+ page, it might be a good idea to set one up anyway—to ward off squatters who might use this tool to dilute or damage your brand.

Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan noted: “Anyone can make a business page for any URL without providing proof that they somehow ‘own’ or are associated with that URL. Potentially, that means pages can pretend to be representing a site they’re not connected with.”

How might Google+ pages affect your social media strategy?

It’s obvious how Google+ pages are attempting to rival Facebook pages, Wired points out the competition with Twitter—a service that is probably more popular with news brands and journalists than Facebook:

“The addition of Pages may be more of a challenge to Twitter. While a certain portion of the population is accustomed to information in 140 character bites, Google+ provides a richer forum where companies can release news to the public.

“Sharing pictures and video on Twitter, for instance, is still a rather clunky process. Followers usually must click through a shortened link and wait for a new page to load. By contrast, Google+ integrates directly with YouTube, the web’s unquestioned video heavyweight, and Picasa, its photo sharing tool.

“What’s more, anyone can readily comment on a Goggle+ Page post, and the Page owner can readily respond. With Twitter, that sort of communication becomes a tedious series of @-messages.”

Next week, I’ll examine how Google+ pages might affect local advertising.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.