51% of American adults get information about local restaurants, bars, and related businesses from the internet.

For other local brick-and-mortar businesses that don’t fit into those categories, 47% of Americans obtain information about those local businesses from the web as well. This probably doesn’t surprise anyone reading this, and may even seem a little bit on the low side. But before you start to criticize, remember that half of American adults is still a very significant number, especially considering the fact that nearly 25% of Americans don’t have a personal computer at home.

What’s more interesting is how those adults responded when asked which online services they used to find this information about local businesses. Search engines like Google and Bing claim by far the largest share of Americans — 38% — who use the services to find out information about local restaurants and bars. For people looking for information about other local businesses, 36% of Americans primarily use search engines to get information about those local businesses as well. These statistics show how overwhelmingly critical the major search engines remain at a time when social media sites seem very trendy. In fact, even smaller search engines completely dwarf all the social media sites in terms of impact for local businesses.

For both of these populations, search engines were dramatically more dominant than specialty websites like Yelp (which came in around 16%) or any type of social media website (which came in at only 3% for restaurants, and just 1% for other businesses). According to the study, people who are conducting research on local businesses are not using social media very much in their research, despite the fact that almost half of Americans are on Facebook, and a half of them are using it daily.

Of course, there could be some chicken-or-egg problems with this: If most local businesses aren’t participating in social media or don’t have their information readily available there, people will shy away from using social media services to find local businesses. Most adults who are familiar with their community will quickly realize where useful resources are and aren’t available for the businesses in their community.

Locally focused businesses should still make sure they have at least a basic social media presence on the major networks — such as a Facebook business page — and that they update it regularly. After all, the number of people using social media to find local businesses is only going to rise, not fall. That way, as users start to use social media more for this kind of research, your business will already be present, positioned well, and have content to share on social networks.

For those businesses that have already invested in building an active, content-rich website using appropriate keywords, this research is great reinforcement that you’ve made the right choice. Search engines are a much more popular method of finding information about local businesses than any other source, either online or offline. Even smaller search engines are much more heavily used than social media sites for this kind of research. Furthermore, 40% of searches conducted on mobile devices are local in nature. People are often searching for information about nearby businesses from their mobile devices, and with the ever-increasing growth of mobile adoption, an effective local search strategy will continue to play a key role in mobile usage, too.

The only other method that was even close was print newspapers, at between 26% and 29% depending on what type of business was being researched. Great search engine optimization, signing up for Google Places, and creating content is critical for making sure you catch the eye of shoppers in your area.

Get more from Pew Research.

Bounce Rate

Definition: The percentage of total emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipient’s inbox, known as a “bounce”

How to Use: Use this metric to uncover potential problems with your email list. There are two kinds of bounces to track: “hard” bounces and “soft” bounces. Soft bounces are the result of a temporary problem with a valid email address, such as a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server. The recipient’s server may hold these emails for delivery once the problem clears up, or you may try re-sending your email message to soft bounces. Hard bounces are the result of an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address, and these emails will never be successfully delivered. Instead, you should immediately remove hard bounce addresses from your email list, because internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates as one of the key factors to determine an email sender’s reputation. Having too many hard bounces can make your organization look like a spammer in the eyes of an ISP.

Delivery Rate

Definition: The percentage of emails that were actually delivered to recipients’ inboxes, calculated by subtracting hard and soft bounces from the gross number of emails sent, then dividing that number by gross emails sent

How to Use: Your delivery rate sets the stage for email success or failure. To have any chance of engaging a customer or prospect with an email campaign, that message has to get
delivered to their inbox. Look for a delivery rate of 95% or higher. If your delivery rate is slipping over time, you may have problems with your list (e.g. too many invalid addresses). If one particular campaign has a lower than average delivery rate, examine the subject line and content of that message. Perhaps there was some element that may have been flagged as spam by corporate firewalls or major ISPs, causing many more message than usual to be blocked.

List Growth Rate

Definition: A measurement of how fast your email list is growing. Calculate your growth rate by subtracting opt-outs and hard bounces from the number of new email subscribers gained in a given month. Then, divide that number by the original list size.

How to Use: Email list growth rate is important because a healthy email marketing program needs to be continually refreshed with new names. Many of the addresses on your email list will naturally “go bad” over time, as people change jobs, switch ISPs or email programs, or just forget their passwords and create new accounts. According to the popular marketing resource MarketingSherpa, the natural churn rate of an email list can be 25% annually or higher, which is why you must continually work to add new contacts to your email database.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Definition: The proportion of the audience who clicked on one more links contained in an email message

How to Use: Organizations can calculate CTR either by dividing unique clicks by the number of emails delivered, or by dividing total clicks – including multiple clicks by the same recipient – by the number of emails delivered. Either method works, as long as you use the same approach consistently.

Monitoring email CTR is a cornerstone of email marketing analytics, because the CTR indicates whether the message was relevant and the offer compelling enough to encourage recipients to action. But CTR can vary widely by the type of message sent. For example, email newsletters often have higher CTRs than promotional messages, and transactional messages – such as emailed purchase receipts – often have the highest CTR of all the messages your business sends. For that reason, it’s best to benchmark your CTRs according to the different types of emails you send.

Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate

Definition: The percentage of recipients who clicked on a “share this” button to post email
content to a social network and/or who clicked on the “forward to a friend” button

How to Use: Sharing rates are another indicator of the value and relevance of your email messages. For example, if your subscribers find your email newsletter articles compelling enough to share with their peers, you’ve likely hit on a hot topic for your audience. Likewise, email offers that get shared or forwarded outside of your own house list can end up being your best performing campaigns, because you’ve drastically increased the reach of that
message by tapping into the viral nature of your subscribers’ social networks. Watch your sharing rates carefully to discover which types of articles and offers tend to get shared the most, and use that knowledge when planning future campaigns.

Conversion Rate

Definition: The percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action, such as filling out a lead generation form or purchasing a product

How to Use: Conversion rate is the ultimate measure of an email campaign’s effectiveness. The higher your conversion rate, the more relevant and compelling the offer was for your audience. However, conversion rates are dependent on factors beyond the original email message, such as the quality of your landing page.

For example, if a campaign underperforms based on your targeted conversion rate, take a close look at the landing page you linked to for reasons why recipients who clicked on a link might not have completed the process. You may find the landing page’s headline or copy needs improvement, or that a registration form or checkout process was too confusing or clunky, causing many visitors to abandon the process.

Measuring conversion rate requires integration between your email platform and your web analytics. You can perform this integration by creating unique tracking URLs for your email links that identify the source of the click as coming from a specific email campaign.

Revenue Per Email Sent

Definition: A measure of the ROI of a particular email campaign, calculated by dividing the total revenue generated from the campaign by the number of emails sent

How to Use: This metric is ideal for ecommerce marketers who generate a lot of direct sales from email campaigns. Again, it requires integration between your ESP and your ecommerce or web analytics platform. If you are already tracking conversion rates, you also can collect the order value for each conversion to perform this calculation.

Unreliable Email Metrics

Open Rate: Open rate is a metric that many marketers use to measure the success of their campaigns, but it’s an unreliable gauge for several reasons. Most importantly, an email is only counted as ‘opened’ if the recipient also receives the images embedded in that message, and a large percentage of your email users likely have image-blocking enabled on their email client. This means that even if they open the email, they won’t be included in your open rate, making it an inaccurate and unreliable metric for marketers, as it underreports on your true numbers.

Unsubscribe Rate: As with open rates, the unsubscribe rate isn’t a reliable picture of the health of your email list. Many subscribers who are tired of receiving email messages from your brand won’t bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process. They’ll just stop opening, reading, and clicking on your email messages.

Problem #1: I don’t know what will resonate. Should I resort to scotch-induced content?

Okay, it’s not really after a nice full glass of scotch, but before keyword research, marketers relied on their ‘gut feeling’ or costly and time consuming focus groups.

Fix It:

Today’s comprehensive online data about keyword traffic (for the most part) and website behavior shows marketers what is really driving behavior. Search and analytics are no replacement for talking to your prospects and customers, but you can get a lot more efficient and targeted with keyword analytics.

Before you create your next ebook, blog post, or even email campaign, be sure to check out your (and your competitors’) traffic-driving keywords. Doing so will give you the insights to enable you to create more compelling content that focuses on the keywords and topics your target audience wants, thus attracting more of the right prospects to your site.

Problem #2: I don’t know where to start. What will have the biggest impact?

Regardless of your business, the sales and marketing process can usually be modeled as a funnel. If you don’t know whether it’s broken at the top, bottom, or leaky somewhere in the middle, then you’re going to have a hard time improving your results. That means scattershot approaches at problem solving, which is never any good.

Fix It:

Enter closed-loop analytics. Dissecting your funnel to understand what’s coming in at the top and the fallout at each stage along the way will help you identify the ‘leakiest’ parts of the funnel so you can start to fix it there. If you have stellar website traffic but only .05% of it converts into a lead, and leads close at a 50% rate, you’ll pretty quickly know that you need to work on that first conversion and investigate why your offers aren’t resonating or if you’re driving the WRONG types of traffic to your site.

Now that’s a simple example, and most funnels are more complex. But no matter your process, in order to do this, you need your analytics to integrate with your CRM system so you can map that funnel all the way to the end.

Problem #3: I don’t know how to evaluate my social media. I’ll just swag it.

Yes, marketers know they should be participating in social media. But so often, it’s hard to justify why. Coming up with a ‘swag’ or ballpark estimate of value is all you can do if you aren’t using analytics.

Fix It:

Not only can marketers use traffic analytics to show the volumes of traffic coming to their site from social media, but if they are using integrated marketing tools, they can also measure leads and even customers generated from a specific channel like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Mapping dollars and cents to social media campaigns makes it a lot easier to invest in the best social media channels for your business and spend less time on those that aren’t generating marketing results. Even without sophisticated tools, you can use customized, short URLs and specific landing pages dedicated to your social campaigns to track their results.

Problem #4: We missed our number, and I’m in a SMarketing war.

Have you ever seen sales and marketing managers at each others’ throats when the team missed quota?

Fix It:

Creating and maintaining a service level agreement (SLA) between your sales and marketing departments and then measuring which type of leads (based on lead scoring) were generated and how many and quickly they were touched by sales is easier than ever. What used to become a knock-down, drag-out battle has grown up into a collaborative business discussion about tweaking lead criteria and optimizing sales processes to make the entire company successful.

If you read this post and thought, “Wait… that sounds like my company’s marketing department,” don’t despair. With some careful implementation of marketing analytics tools, you can turn your organization into a data-driven marketing machine!

Why Optimize for Local Search? It’s in the Numbers

• Approximately 3 billion search queries contain local terms every month. (Source: comScore)
• 70% of online searchers will use local search to find offline businesses. (Source: Kelsey Group)
• 20% of Google searches are for local information. (Source: HubSpot via Google)

How to Optimize for Local Search on Your Website

• Blog, blog, blog. Every new blog is a new indexed page for your site, a new page on which to target a geographic search phrase, and a new opportunity to get found in the search engine results pages (SERPs). If you’re having trouble coming up with geo-targeted content, consider highlighting customer success stories and case studies.
• Write about complementary local services. If you sell screwdrivers, talk about someone in your area who sells screws. It lets you write helpful content about your geographic area in a relevant way so you’re not faced with awkward keyword stuffing that Google’s algorithm punishes. Plus, it builds good will with local businesses that can introduce you to new customers, and possibly result in an inbound link in the future.
• Optimize the 5 crucial on-page SEO elements. That means your page title, URL, header tags, image alt text, and page content should be optimized with local terms. Here’s an example of a page that is well optimized for local search. You can also make use of the vertical bar in page titles as an easy way of consistently indicating your location to search engines.
• Target long-tail keyword variations for your geographic area. If you’re selling unicorn costumes, you might want to cover unicorn costumes in Detroit, unicorn costumes in metro Detroit, and unicorn costumes in southeastern Michigan. Cover all the ways people might refer to your city in your keyword research so you can capitalize on all the different ways people find you on the web. You can perform long-tail keyword research in Google’s Keyword Tool, or if you use HubSpot software, use HubSpot’s Keyword Tool to help find variations you might not have thought of before.
• Write about local and industry news. Stay up to date on what’s happening in your community and in your industry for blog fodder. This will win you big points in the SERPs, as Google Panda’s recent freshness update started rewarding timely content more than it has in the past. Even if nothing has happened that directly relates to your industry or location, look for local spins on industry trends, and comment on how local events could affect your industry.
• Mobile-optimize your site. Local search and mobile search go hand in hand. 40% of Google Maps usage is on mobile devices, and it has a total of 150 million mobile users. Some of the most common ways people will use your site in a mobile environment is looking up reviews, finding directions to your location, and searching for contact information. Make it easy for them by making your site mobile friendly.

How to Optimize for Local Search Off Your Website

• Register your business with Google Places. According to Google, there are nearly 50 million Google Places pages, and just over 4 million of the business listings have been claimed by business owners. This is a huge opportunity for local businesses to appear in the Google Places results for a given search term. But to do so, you have to register your business on Google Places and have a well optimized site.
• Submit to local directories. The more local directories to which you submit your site, the more opportunities to get found and receive inbound links. Use this list of 50 business directories to get started!
• Be a celebrity. The more of a fixture you are in your community (both online and offline), the more people will talk about you. Be a guest blogger, talk to and about (positively, of course!) other people in your industry, and act as a resource provider for the community. If you’re an active participant in community conversations, the buzz around you grows in the form of inbound links, social media growth, and media coverage.
• Publish your content on social media outlets, especially Google+ business pages. Google considers content shared on social media more important now than ever before. And now that Google+ has business pages, social and search are even more closely aligned. Most importantly for local businesses, Google+ business pages are starting to show up in Google Places search results. If you haven’t started your Google+ business page yet, build one now.
• Be on local review sites. 77% of online shoppers use reviews to make a purchasing decision. If your customers are looking for opinions on you, make it easier for them to find out how awesome you are by embracing your presence on online review sites. Claim your listings. Ask customers to post about their great experiences with you. Yes, some negative reviews may slip in there, but wouldn’t you rather be an active participant in achieving a positive online reputation than take a passive role in maintaining a lackluster one?

1. Set Up Your Goals

What do you want to achieve from your campaign? If you want to direct traffic to your website, what should success look like? A newsletter sign-up? A purchased product? If you want to send traffic to your Facebook Page, is your goal to convert page visitors into fans?

2. Outline Your Ad Campaign Plan

Set up a formal campaign that outlines different types of ads that you can split test. Split testing involves changing one piece of the ad, such as the photo, and keeping the other elements the same to see which ad performs better. Rotate your ads every couple of days to keep them fresh. No one wants to see the same ad over and over.

3. Decide Who to Target

Research targeting options before running the ad. Watch how the Estimated Reach and the Suggested Bid changes as you add different targets. Optimize your bid price and reach to get the best price. Let’s review some of Facebook’s targeting options:

LOCATION

You can target by country, state, city, and even zip code.

AGE

You can choose a range or no upper bound maximum. Facebook gives you the option to require an exact match within an age range if you select the ‘Require Exact Age Match’ box. This means that if a user turned 51 yesterday, that user will not be shown the ad for which you selected the age range of 25 to 50.

However, it’s better not to require an exact match, because Facebook will give you a “discounted bid” for people who click your ad who are slightly outside the range (although Facebook does not provide an exact idea of “slightly,” and it doesn’t specify its definition of “discounted bid”).

INTERESTS

Interests are displayed in a person’s profile and are drawn from the keywords used in their information. When you start typing, you may notice the # symbol next to some words. Facebook refers to this as “topic targeting.” For example, there may be many pages or interests around the term “bicycle,” and by selecting #bicycle, you are including all of them so you don’t have to individually select each one. If you want the specific term and not a broader match, choose the term without the # symbol in front. You can also click the ‘Switch to Broad Category Targeting’ link to use a broader range of general terms to target, such as “Outdoor Fitness Activities.”

CONNECTIONS ON FACEBOOK

The radio button is defaulted to “anyone,” but you can choose to include or exclude fans of the Facebook Pages you are the admin of.

ADVANCED DEMOGRAPHICS

Many of these selections will limit your audience heavily, so only choose these options if you have a very specific purpose.

4. Define the Budget

Decide how much you are going to spend per day and for the whole campaign. When you choose your daily budget, your ad will automatically shut off when that budget is reached. You can also run the campaign for a certain amount of time–three days, five days, etc.–so you don’t have to worry about your campaign exceeding your budget.

On the bid, we suggest bidding in the middle of the ‘Suggested Bid’ range or higher. If you bid too low, your ad won’t show up. If your ad gets more clicks, you will be rewarded with a lower click price. Give your ad the best chance to get more clicks by bidding high.

Research what other ads are in Facebook’s rotation. These are only going to be the ads that your Facebook profile qualifies for viewing, so it’s not a complete list. But it’s good to see what other users are doing.

5. Track Your Progress

Know which metrics you must watch to determine if your ads are successful. Make sure you know how to determine if the lead or sale came from the Facebook ad versus other traffic. Trackable links, special coupon codes, and custom landing pages are great options to track leads and sales.

Now that you are driving all this traffic to your website, make sure you are measuring it. Hopefully, you have some tools to measure where your website traffic comes from and what terms people are using to find you. HubSpot’s software, for instance, includes an analytics tool that gives you exactly this information. It tells you not only where your traffic is coming from, but also how effectively these visits turn into leads and customers.

Google Analytics is another great tool for in-depth analysis. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website, it isn’t hard to do. Using an analytics software, you can drill down into the Facebook statistics and see what is working and what isn’t.

1.) Tap user-generated content. The growth of social media and community-sourced content from citizen journalists and bloggers has exploded in 2011. But as we know, unfiltered user-generated content isn’t necessarily good content. Arguably, the explosion of community content has only created more demand for experts who can act as trusted advisors that route only the best stuff to its audience. Be that expert guide, and remember that the fact that it’s user generated can often positively outweigh any editorial inadequacies you may find, but it’s your job to keep the right balance.

2.) Talk about your mistakes. Social marketers who master the art of crafting stories have the opportunity to spark interest by creating a shared experience. And no shared experience is more endearing than sharing the mistakes you’ve made that your readers have likely also experienced. Telling this type of story humanizes your brand and makes you relatable. By sharing your mistakes, you’ll find you become a special breed of influencer that becomes part of the community, versus just marketing to the community.

3.) Make content personal. What a generic statement. What does this really mean? It means you should talk about why you’re discussing a topic, and why it’s important to you. There’s some reason you decided to create this particular piece of content; share that motivation with the audience so they know why they should care, too.

4.) Respond to news content. If a story is happening that will affect your audience, write about it with a spin that’s specific to your industry. This takes the news story out of the abstract and makes it personal, relevant, and helpful for your readers. On top of that, you’ll be rewarded in search engines with Google’s freshness algorithm update.

5.) Use real life examples. Produce case studies. Highlight your customers’ experiences. Find people who are doing it right, even if they’re not in your network (a great way to make new friends in your industry, by the way!) If you can’t find a real life example, create a use case in which you write your own characters who exemplify your audience’s persona. Bringing your content into real life scenarios will have a bigger impact on your readers that makes your content more likely to be shared.

6.) Talk like a human. Enough with the business babble. Don’t worry about sounding smart. It’s alienating and condescending, and your story will be quickly lost on your audience. Talk like a human being that cares about making meaningful relationships with people. Clarity is more important than big, fancy words.

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29435/How-to-Master-the-Art-of-Storytelling-to-Increase-Social-Sharing.aspx#ixzz1hELpyN16

As you can guess, there are some social media best practices that can be applied across all social networks. Consider the following questions when publishing any social media update, whether you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn.

• Have I included keywords? Search engines are taking cues from social media more and more, making it increasingly important to include appropriate keywords for your business and industry in your social media updates. This will make them even more searchable and help people find you and your content in search engines.
• Am I being engaging? Sure, social media is an awesome platform to promote your content and offers, but you also need to be social. Allocate some of the posts you publish purely to engaging with your fans and followers. Ask questions, respond to their comments, and stay involved.
• Am I including lead generation content? As a marketer, you need to prove the ROI of your social media engagement. If you’re not actively sprinkling in your lead generation content like webinars, downloadable ebooks, and other offers, you’ll surely miss the mark.
• Is my update valuable to my target audience? Every update you publish should provide value to the audience you want to reach. Don’t waste you and your fans/followers’ time with useless information. Share information that informs, engages, interests, and educates your target customer.
• Am I posting frequently enough? You need to make sure you’re regularly engaging your fans and followers with fresh content on a regular basis, or they won’t have a reason to come back and visit your account often. Acceptable posting frequency can vary from social network to social network. For example, you’ll find that you can get away with posting more on Twitter than on Facebook, given the shorter lifespan of a tweet compared to a Facebook post.

1.) Supply Ordering App: Are you a business product supplier? Create a supply ordering app that lets people order new supplies by photographing a bar code on the product they need restocked. Users can securely store their shipping and billing information in the app, edit the quantity, and quickly get more of the supplies they need. Make their lives even easier by tapping into their buying history and providing push notifications for when they are likely running low on a certain supply. You should also include reviews, recommended products, and shipping status notifications for a superior experience.

2.) Event App: Plan on hosting an event this year? Create an event-specific app with exhibit maps, session schedules, speaker bios, and attendee-provided contact information for networking. You can also let people push out messages to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook right from the app.

3.) ROI Calculator: The ROI calculator is a tried and true app for business people who are constantly on the hook for proving ROI. Whatever action you want your prospects to take, an app that lets them quickly calculate the ROI of some aspect of it not only makes them happier, but it also makes your sale easier.

4.) Code Generator: Have an audience that has to do online design during their day job? Create a code generator to make it easier! For example, a marketer who is a novice with HTML might select your HTML code generator to quickly figure out how to code her next email campaign. That’s one helpful app that can be used over and over, and spread to a wider audience quickly.

5.) Security Alert App: Are your customers concerned with online security? People in IT security or software can create an app that delivers security alerts when customers experience a security breach. IT departments the world over will love you for it.

6.) Networking App: Use the location-aware capabilities of mobile devices to create an app that lets your prospects and customers find people in their industry with which to network. Couple this with thought leadership content delivered through your app, and you’re on your way to becoming the LinkedIn of your industry.

7.) Content Segmenting App: Is your content one of your biggest assets? If you’re publishing high volumes of content, create an app that lets your readers select only the topics they want to learn about, and receive updates when you publish something new on that subject.

8.) Software Features App: If you’re a software company, make an app that lets people use features of your software on their mobile devices. For example, create an app that alerts your sales team when a new lead needs to be contacted. This way, they can beat your competitors to the punch and make sales even when they’re not at their desk!

9.) Calculator App: B2B companies with an audience in a mathematical field can create a calculator app. Provide quick calculations based on frequently used formulas to help them out in their day-to-day job. This will solidify your status as a reliable and helpful resource in your industry and make you a part of their daily lives.

10.) Legal Compliance App: Do your prospects and customers work in a highly regulated industry? Create an app that answers legal questions, delivers results for government guidelines, and provides safety requirements so people can figure out if they’re being compliant at all times.

Special retirement benefits once reserved for police, firefighters and others with dangerous jobs are now being given to tens of thousands of state workers employed as park rangers, foresters, dispatchers, coroners, even highway laborers, museum guards and lifeguards.

The trend will add heavily to the $70 billion that state taxpayers owe state retirement funds each year and is costing states such as Florida and Maryland $15 million to $30 million annually, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

Thirty-one states have passed laws since 2000 that expand the range of workers who can retire when they turn 50 or 55 or after working 20 or 25 years, then collect special pensions that will pay some an extra $1 million or more in retirement. The pensions are enhanced because they are usually based on a higher percentage of a worker’s salary than pensions for ordinary state workers.

In Illinois, where highway maintenance workers earn up to $148,000 a year with overtime, early enhanced retirement can pay a $75,000-a-year pension at age 50 after 25 years on the job. That adds up to $2.2 million if the retiree lives to age 80 — or $1.2 million more than if the person had been in the state’s regular retirement plan. A 25-year Florida crime lab analyst can get a $60,000 pension at age 50 and collect $1.8 million by age 80, compared with $575,000 if the person was not in the state’s “special-risk class.”

Read more about states expanding lucrative pensions to more jobs.

1. Not posting consistently. Many marketers rushed to set up Google+ business pages for their company, but as marketers tend to do, they got busy. Many posted a few times in the first week, and then went silent. Maybe they came back and posted two or three times in a day, and then went silent for another week or two. This publishing inconsistency throws followers for a loop and prevents you from building momentum. Short bursts of publishing quickly loses steam. Google+ business pages are still young; if you’re going to make an attempt to leverage it for marketing, give it more time and dedicate yourself to regularly publishing fresh content.
2. Poor use of photos. Google+ business pages are a phenomenal platform for sharing photos, and there are a few best practices for leveraging your photo sharing there. First, provide a mix of text and photo updates; only posting text doesn’t leverage the awesome Google+ photo display capabilities that improve the visitor’s experience. Second, be sure you’ve uploaded a profile picture that relates to your company, otherwise visitors won’t be sure they’ve reached the right Google+ business page. Third, don’t post boring pictures! You know who is doing this? Believe it or not, Google+.
   Instead of pictures of the page moderators, fun cartoons, or snapshots into Google HQ, we see brand icons that provide little value and no entertainment.
3. Not applying for Direct Connect. If you don’t register for Direct Connect, you won’t be eligible to get found in SERPs and added to searchers’ Circles simply by querying +YourName, nor will your Google+ business page posts appear in search engine results. This will impede not just the growth of your social media followers, but your SEO, too.
4. Not using recommended links. Recommended links can be found on the ‘About’ section of a Google+ business page, and it allows you to drive traffic to your website and generate leads from landing pages. Google+ business pages also provide a field for your website URL. Not using these fields is a missed opportunity for your business, plain and simple.
5. Vague personal taglines. The personal tagline should succinctly and clearly describe who you are. This is particularly important to help followers avoid confusion if you are a popular brand or a company with a popular name that many other businesses may have. For an example, let’s take a look at the first result returned when performing a search for Facebook on Google+.
   Look at that page! Their follower number is in the high thousands, they’re posting really interesting content every day, engagement is high, and their photos are very high quality. This looks like Facebook’s Google+ business page. But wait…check out that tagline: “facebook community on google+.” Is this the official Facebook page? Frankly, it’s pretty unclear. The page is maintained so well that it certainly could be, but the tagline seems to indicate otherwise. Don’t put your followers through this confusion; make it blatantly obvious in the tagline.
6. Not verifying your page with Google+. Verifying your page with Google+ helps establish a connection between your Google+ page and your website, mitigating the possibility that someone will make a copycat page around your brand name. It also gives you preference in search results on Google and Google+ if you are approved for Direct Connect. If you haven’t verified your page yet, Virante has written a detailed blog post on how to go through the verification process.
7. Not leveraging Circles to segment your followers. Circles is one of the features unique to Google+ business pages that made lots of people want to jump on the bandwagon. Instead of talking to your entire follower base, you can put people into Circles that let you target communications better. Time magazine is an example of a business that is segmenting Google+ circles well, creating topic Circles so readers only hear about the content that interests them. Circles are also an excellent solution for international businesses or businesses with an international base that frequently communicate with customers in multiple languages.