A day or so ago, Google Plus finally opened up organizational Google Plus “Pages” to everyone. These are similar in concept to Facebook Pages: a Google Plus Page is for brands, organizations, and businesses, and a Google Plus Profile is for individuals.
I just set up my library’s Google Plus Page, and it was really easy to do. Here’s what I did:
- First, you need a personal Google Plus Profile. Just like Facebook, Google wants you to be a real person (here’s a link to mine if you’re curious).
- Go here –https://plus.google.com/u/0/pages/create – to set up the Page
- Choose a category for your library. I chose “Company, Institution or Organization” for ours.
- Fill in your Institution’s name and URL. I chose to put in our full name (Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library) rather than the shortened “topekelibrary” that we often use for social media sites, because our full name shows up on the account.
- Select a Category – really, a subcategory of the “Company, Institution or Organization” thing you picked up in #3 above. This gives you a lot of suggestions … none of which are Libraries. I ended up choosing Institution (though Government Agency, Education, or Other would have worked ok too).
- Click Create.
- Then, you’re given the option to Share your new Google Plus Page with all your Google Plus friends (I did that, but you don’t have to).
After that, I fleshed out our account info a little bit by doing these things:
- Added a photo for the G+ icon (our library’s logo for now)
- Asked our Marketing dept for some pictures to add on the Photos tab
- Created some Circles – I kept the Following circle for random follows, then created these additional Circles: Customers (for library patrons), Staff (for library staff), and Librarians (for librarians who don’t work at my library but want to follow)
- Added links to our Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr accounts
- Finally, I sent out our first status update message – “Just setting up Topeka Library’s dandy new Google Plus Page for organizations. Let’s explore it together!”
That’s pretty much it. What will we do with it? For starters, I’ll probably post a couple things a week there, to see if other people in our service area are interested in using Google Plus to connect with the library. After that (I’ll give it 6 months or so) we’ll see.
A couple other examples of Google Plus Library Pages:
- Skokie Public Library
- Falvey Memorial Library
- Springfield City Library
- Garaget (a cool-sounding library in Sweden)
- Cedar Rapids Public Library
update – Joe Murphy has a great post on Google Plus Pages for Libraries. Check it out!
Cool! Now the question is … what will your library DO with a Google Plus Page, now that they are available?
image by Bruce Clay
Does anyone know anyway to set one up using your library’s gmail? It of course wants a “real” name for the personal google+ and we’re not really wanting to risk losing access to our youtube account if we put in something and it accepts it but gets caught later (since it seems like some have had more than just their google+ account disabled) Anyone know? I couldn’t find anywhere to ask Google about it…
Just as a point of information, there are also some more advanced photo editing capabilities in G+. Look for the Creative Kit link to the right of the photo you want to edit when you’re setting up your account. Very handy for odd-size photos!
Thanks for this tutorial, David!
I’m planning to skew “techie” with our G+ page. We have a FB page for regular events and general information, but this will be where I talk more about what tech we offer – our wireless, our PCC, our computer classes, etc. I’m also hoping to be able to do monthly hangouts next year with an emphasis on Web resources (databases, Overdrive, etc.) and do the occasional “talk to a tech” drop in hangout where I take questions and try to answer them. That’s all I’ve got so far – we’ll see how it works out!
Hie!
I am working at Garaget and I just noticed that your link to our G+ Page ends up at your G+ Page (Topeka)….could you please change that?
Thank you : )
/lisa
Ah – looks like google plus adds extra stuff on their URLs…. fixed, and thanks!
I’ve been wondering that too. I’m moving to a different library in a couple weeks, and I don’t want my current library’s G+ page tied to my account (or to anyone’s personal account, really). I wish we could at least have multiple administrators of the page.
I’ll guess Google will eventually set that up .. but for now there isn’t a way to do it – it HAS to be tied to a personal account at the moment. Hopefully it won’t take Google long to “fix” this 🙂
Interesting. I might create one for my tutoring website. I’m just curious: How effective is Google+ for education/e-learning websites?Â
interesting post. Â my question is how we can name our google plus page as in Facebook we write http://www.facebook.com/ticketsmate and desired page is open
can we do the same in Google plus if yes than how. ????
Nope. No special naming of google plus pages yet.
David
So now that it has been more than 6 months, How do you feel your use for the library has been? I am considering a Google+ page for my library, but honestly I don’t think anyone is out there!
I second Diane’s query, wondering how the Library’s use of G+ is going. I noticed Topeka’s is not necessarily disseminating a lot, but has it be interesting in terms of who is adding it to their circles; or in revealing anything interesting about the community? …
 I’m also curious about the commenter Robin Hastings experience – did the techie skew have a particularly positive effect? …
 + Jimmy the Geek’s mention of the photo editing reminded me how many image artists were using G+ when I first tried it out… is there a connection for libraries in that (would it mostly be through “collecting”?)