In the past Google+, Googles social media platform, was a great place for local businesses. The business page would display the name, address, phone number, local reviews and any posts on the same page. Recently there have been a lot of changes made to the Google+ pages, with the addition of the Collections, and others. The whole look of the Google+ pages has changed completely, and with it many of the benefits for local businesses. Here is an example of the old Google+ page, and the new.
In this snip of the old style Google+ you can see the name, address, phone number and the reviews.
The new layout makes every page have a similar look. It gives Google+ uniformity and consistency, which may be nice for some users, but looking at the snip below there is no information about the phone number, address or reviews. You can find information about the address and phone number by clicking on the “i” icon, but it is not simple.
The change that will probably affect most small businesses in the removal of the reviews. For any of you who have tried to get reviews on Google knows it can be cumbersome and annoying. Using your Google+ page was one of the best places to direct your customers for those reviews. There are still ways to get reviews obviously, but these changes have made it much more difficult. They will not be coming back either. To read some more about this take a look at this post.
