Google+ Brand Page Concept

Naturally, with the advent of any new social platform, brands want to be included.

Almost immediately after the Google+ launch, we started to see a few, mainly tech-related blogs, creating brand profiles there.

However, the Google+ profiles aren't really set up for brands. The profiles ask a lot of questions more applicable to humans—for example—if a profile is male or female. This created some initial confusion, but Google VP of Products, Bradley Horowitz, quickly responded with:

Let me be clear — and I'm sorry if this wasn't obvious — we are not currently supporting brands, organizations, and non-human entities in the Google+ field trial.

Supporting these non-human entities is an obviously great feature — we have no allergy to it at all! It's just not part of the system we are currently testing.

So, while we wait to see how Google plans to incorporate brands into Google+, I decided to come up with a little concept of how that might look. Once I started to hack this together, it became clear just how powerful brand pages could be on Google+.

(The mockup image that went with this lived through several blog migrations and didn't make it to this one—you'll have to picture a three-column brand profile with a Maps module bolted onto the side and a Sparks feed for good measure. My notes on it did survive:)

Inclusion of Google +1 Button

Brands have official websites, and those websites can benefit from receiving +1's right on the profile page.

Verification

Determining if a profile is genuine is important. Brand pages will need some way to verify a page and then reflect that status.

Google Maps

As many brands have physical locations, it makes sense to offer some type of Google Maps module.

Displaying Circles

Unlike personal pages, brands may want to show off their circles. Here's a great chance to segment your audience and showcase top fans or employees.

Canvas Page

For the middle column, (labeled "About Us" in this example), brands would prefer a less structured module. The ability to stylize and include custom marketing creative would be great.

Google Offers

Once Google Offers (Google's answer to Groupon) rolls out more widely, I can see it being included here in the sub navigation. Brands may want to call out active offers even more prominently.

Sparks

I like them and hope Google continues to further develop them. In the right column, brands could feature Sparks related to their brand or products.

2026 note: Google+ shut down in 2019, Bradley Horowitz's field trial answer aged into a punchline, and "add me to a circle" is now a dead link (it was http://gplus.to/percival, in case you were curious). But the underlying question—how does a platform represent a brand's data instead of a person's—didn't go away, it just moved. These days it's not Google+ deciding whether your brand gets a profile picture; it's ChatGPT and Perplexity deciding whether your product titles are clean enough to read out loud to a shopper. I wrote about the current version of this problem fifteen years later. Same instinct, different platform, way higher stakes.