So the big news this week is Google+ has finally launched brand pages.

It seems as though the master plan from Google has been to build up the Google+ community before adding on the brand pages – presumably in order to make the network a lot more appealing for brands and providing extra impetus for them to put their hand in their pocket to pull out their advertising dollars (I do of course mean pound sterling).

On launch day, Google announced that 20 companies including Angry Birds and Pepsi already had pages, but one day later many more had already signed up from newspapers (including the Independent and The Metro) to Automotive companies (step forward Mercedes-Benz).

So what we do know is that a new feature Direct Connect should make it possible for users to visit Google+ pages without a single click.  Precede a brand name with a plus sign and apparently you’ll go straight to their Google+ page (ie search for +Angry Birds).  This could be a great feature but unfortunately it has only been activated for a few chosen brands, so we can’t get excited about it just yet.

So the million dollar question is what happens now?  We are familiar with grandstanding ad campaigns playing out on facebook and competitions running on twitter but what should we expect from Google+?

As we wait and see, the most immediate question is, are you or the brand you represent about to start a Google+ brand page?

By now we are all used to the customary hype surrounding an announcement from facebook, and their unveiling of new facebook insights has been no exception. However in this case we think the hype is worth paying attention to.

In summary, facebook have expanded their facebook pages analytics to go beyond merely telling us about what is happening within our facebook pages – number of fans, number of interactions and page impressions – to giving us a detailed breakdown of how the whole facebook community has been reacting to our content, whether they are members of the facebook page or not.

This means as a marketer we can now use these new facebook insights to analyse the viral effect on fan pages.

Firstly we can see the number of unique “friends of fans” – which effectively sets out our potential marketing universe for each of our facebook pages (although it can be expanded with advertising).

Secondly we can look at outreach. How many people actually saw our content and whether they were our fans (organic) friends of fans (viral) or have seen our advertising (paid).

Thirdly we can easily analyse who is actually responding to our content via the “Talking About” metric.

So we now have a clearly defined potential market, we can see our saturation of that market, and how effective that has been. That’s a big deal.

Our CEO Jonathan Brech recently presented at the Figaro Digital Social Media conference.

The theme? Forget about your fan and follower numbers. Social Media is fundamentally the same as any other marketing channel. You need to understand the audience, build and compelling message and retain the audience.

The challenge is to know what success looks like, and to be sufficiently knowledgeable quantify it.

So how do we measure this social behaviour? See our presentation below, and let us know your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter.