5 Ways To Use Google Plus Hangouts In Your Business

Google Plus hasn’t yet become quite as popular or widely used as Google’s other products, but it's a very powerful social networking tool with a lot of potential. It has many of the same features as the more popular Facebook, but Google Plus also has something Facebook doesn’t – Hangouts.

A Hangout is a great tool for connecting with others. Essentially, it’s a group video in which up to 10 individuals can participate. Facebook does have a one-on-one video calling feature, but having the ability to connect with more than one person at a time opens up a host of possibilities for your business.Below are five ways you can use Google Plus Hangouts in your business.

Meet With Clients

You can use a Hangout to immediately, effectively and efficiently meet with your clients. Depending on the type of business you’re in, this could speed up how quickly you can service your customers. For example, if you are in a visually oriented line of work, you can share work in progress directly with your client on a hangout, be able to get instant feedback and possibly even modify or update your work with the immediate direction of client. Furthermore, using a Hangout can avoid situations where you might otherwise get conflicting or poorly timed feedback from multiple individuals within a client company.

Product Demonstrations and Training

If you sell a product that your new customers might not be familiar with, you can conduct a product demonstration or training session via Google Plus hangouts. Conducting these sessions in a Hangout can be vastly superior to recording and publishing training videos on your website, since doing so in a Hangout will give customers the opportunity to ask questions, and give you the opportunity to answer them in real time. If someone participating in the Hangout wants to see a certain aspect of the demonstration or training done again, or viewed from a different angle, you’ll be able to do it in real time and provide a higher level of customer satisfaction.

Virtual Help Desk

If your business sells physical products, you may be able to conduct a significant amount of your customer assistance and warranty support function through a Google Plus Hangout.

Internal Conferences and Status Meetings

You don’t have to use Google Plus solely in relation to your customers. You can also use the Hangout feature to manage your staff, independent contractors, and anyone else who does work for your business. This can be particularly helpful – perhaps even essential – when you have contributors located in different parts of the country or different parts of the world.

Re-purpose Google Plus Hangouts

After the hangout is over you can re-purpose the content. Google has made this easy for businesses by allowing you to record the hangout to YouTube. You can make the video unlisted and delete it from your Google Profile. Then recording can be used as a free gift for subscribing to a newsletter or as an added bonus for a product. You can also make the recording available to members only like CBBZ is in the process of implementing. Exclusive replays of free one time only online events can be a big selling point for a membership site. Webdesign.com is very successful at holding free online events and offering exclusive replays for members only.

Google Plus Hangouts are still a new technology, and it’s likely that there are still many more uses we haven’t yet thought of. Keep an open mind and use this powerful tool in any way that will help your business.