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Showing posts from September, 2012

You say Google+ is a ghost land? Time to revisit that one

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This post was also published on CNET. The company has taken repeated hits in the press, but Google+ is fast becoming a social business for small businesses. Compared with Facebook or Twitter, Google+ can seem like a veritable ghost land. I'm finding few posts from friends or interesting people on the service. And it's not just anecdotal observations of there being slim pickings. A recent report by RJMetrics found weak user engagement with the social network. And yet Google+ claims to have an ever-growing number of users. So how has it managed to pull off that neat feat? The not-so-apparent fact is that Google has aggressively integrated its social network throughout its properties, thus driving users to unwittingly use Google+. This is particularly true of Google+'s pages for small businesses, also known as Google+ Local . For instance, when users search for a small business, Google automatically showcases that business on the right side of the page, as part of its