Best Practices for creating Google+ and/or Google+ Local Pages

[John Tabita]

I'm looking for best practices for creating Google+ and/or Google+ Local Pages.

We offer both social media profile creation and Google+ Local claiming. With all the recent changes, these two separate services potentially conflict.

Here's what happens. A client purchases our claimed listings service and social media creation, then picks Google+ as one of his social media profile choices.

If a client has an unclaimed Local listing, can we safely claim it, then also create a G+ Page? Months ago, a Google representative told us that they we're starting to merge pages, but not everyone had the option to do so yet. Would best practices be to create both, then merge them?

Your expert opinion(s) would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi John,

Hard to keep up with all the crazy changes, I know. Glad you asked before creating a G+ page.
Since the beginning of the year almost all G+ Local (Place pages) have been auto upgraded to G+.

Plus for over a year now Mike B, Google and I have been saying don't create separate G+ pages and try to merge them. Those that did, have been having problems and often the manually created G+ page has to be deleted with all the posts and followers because it becomes a dupe when G upgrades the Place page to social.

Where we are at today: New Places claims ALL automatically create a G+ page and auto merge.
(Almost immediately) As of today almost all old Place pages have been upgraded to G+ except multi-location or problematic cases.

If you subscribe to the G+ Local IMPORTANT section of the forum here, you won't miss any important announcements.

I know Google changes so much it's hard to keep up with!