Photo Credit: George Papaconstantinou/Flickr

Google Hangouts are a terrific platform for melding your online video marketing with your social media. Directly connected to your Google+ account, it provides the advantage of being super easy to use, and fast. You can go online and create a Hangout, and begin broadcasting in minutes, and then after that find it uploaded to your YouTube channel for you! Sounds like a perfect business medium to me.

Not only that, they're free to use. This makes it easy to choose to adopt Hangouts at least in part for your business, even so the question remains, how? Which ways are best incorporate this platform into my marketing mix quickly and easily?

Let's look at 3 ways you can do just that!

3 Uses of Google Hangouts in your Business

Another choice for webinars – Using webinars in your small business could be cost-prohibitive, especially if you are using a state of the art platform like GoToWebinar, which can set you back over $500 if you have a decent sized audience. Hangouts, alternatively, are free to run and most of the heavy lifting is done for you, including the recording and rendering of the video. This can make it really easy to use Hangouts for webinars on the fly, customer service tutorials and more.

Give a glimpse into your business – Hangouts can be an easy way to show off your latest products, introduce new services, and give a look inside your business. Using hangouts for instruction and customer service are excellent ways to increase your brand authority and give customers top-notch service. This is especially valid if you use social media together with Hangouts to widen your reach.

Engagement and fast service – Hangouts work great for engaging with your audience, particularly a small one. Being virtually face to face with your audience is invaluable, and has a great many benefits with regards to your efforts to brand yourself in your chosen market. Hangouts also make it possible to be a participant in what is becoming known as Agile marketing, that is, the ability to quickly respond to trends and market events with answers and solutions. This type of ability on your part will resonate wide within your market.

Photo Credit: Flickr/ RobertG NL

The latest offering from the folks at Google is straight appropriate to small and local business. Google My Business is a one-stop page for business to handle their presence on various Google products, from search, maps and Google+, Google Analytics, as well as Hangouts. This is Google's effort to take a few of Facebook's thunder, by permitting its users to publish and share news, events and images one time, and have them populate through the whole of their Google services.

Google states it's dealing with transitioning all business accounts that are on Google+ or Places for Business, and you ought to see this soon. There is likewise an Android app now, and the iPhone app will certainly follow soon.

So how will this one work?

It appears that the primary advantage to this new offering is that all of your Google services are now under one roofing system. That, and the reality that the ease of updating and occupying all your properties is much easier. When you log into Google My Business for the first time, you'll see that Google has actually taken the liberty of populating your account utilizing what you've put into the other Google properties. You have the opportunity to take care of or change what you need to easily.

Next up is the heart of the operation. On one simple screen you have access to the following:

• Google+ Shares.
• Google Insights.
• Customer Reviews.
• Google Analytics.
• Google Hangouts.

You can get to those functions from this screen and add content, handle review and even start a Hangout. The mobile version of Google My Business is smooth and extremely easy to browse.

Is this the final end of Google+?

It might be prematurely to tell what this indicates for Google+. At this point, simply think of this as a change of address. At this time there does not appear to be any loss of functions for Google+ and it might really benefit from the automated environment and much better organization this supplies.