Google+, the new social network from Google, will welcome businesses – but only later this year.

The Google+ social network was launched by Google at the end of June, in an attempt to compete against the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn.

Since its launch, Google+ invites have been hard to come by. Entry into Google+ has been a stop-start ride, even for consumers, with Google+ limiting the number of people joining the network. 

Many businesses are keen to join Google+, but they will need to wait a while longer, says Christian Oestlien, a group product manager at Google:

“We have a great team of engineers actively building an amazing Google+ experience for businesses, and we will have something to show the world later this year. The business experience we’re creating should far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses.”

Indeed, Google is discouraging businesses from using regular/consumer Google+ profiles to interact with customers.

“Our policy team will actively work with profile owners to shut down non-user profiles,” Oestlien says. “Over the next few months, we’re going to be running a small experiment with a few marketing partners to see the effect of including brands in the Google+ experience.”

This experiment is thought to begin with a (very) small group of businesses, before being rolled out more widely.

Eventually, it is thought that Google+ will connect with other business services such as Google AdWords and offer rich analytics for companies to measure performance.

Have no clue about how Google+ works? Check out the video below.

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