Google+ Pages Add Support for Multiple Managers

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Google+ is adding some important features for Page owners. Among them: support for multiple administrators, notifications, and a consolidated view of how Google+ users have engaged with a brand page.

The most crucial of these is multi-manager support, which allows page owners to add up to 50 managers for a page. Previously a branded Google+ Page could only be operated through a single user's login credentials. This had posed obvious problems for global marketers and agencies that employ more than one - and sometimes dozens - of staffers empowered to manage Twitter, Facebook, and other social media accounts. For smaller marketers, the single-user restriction came with the risk of losing control of the page if the individual responsible for managing it left the company.

Meanwhile two other features will aid reporting and analysis of Google+ activity. Notifications will inform managers of recent activity on a page, including comments, friend adds, shares, and so on. Additionally, brand pages will be emblazoned with a count of how many users have interacted either by +1'ing it or by adding the page to a circle. The count will be visible to all users.

Brands have rapidly adopted Google+, motivated in part by SEO concerns. Google has signaled it will eventually use Google+ data as a signal for search relevance; presumably that will include user interactions with a brand on the site. But there's not much evidence to date that it's done so. (See comments on this SEW post.)

And brand stewards are, of course, keeping an eye on Google+ traffic. As of mid-November, four months after Google launched it, Google+ recorded its third largest week, receiving 6.8 million visits in the U.S., according to Hitwise. Much of that traffic was referred by other Google properties; sites like Gmail and Google.com accounted for 73 percent of all inbound visits to Google+ during the week. But Hitwise has observed organic stickiness as well, as the average length of a user visit in October was 15 percent higher than in September.

In a blog post early this morning, Google states the new features are available now, but as of 1:30pm EST ClickZ's own Google+ page still could not access them.

In the below video, a Google+ Pages product engineer discusses the changes: