With more than 40 million individual members, Google Plus has now expanded to include business entities by adding the ability for organizations to create their own pages.

A Google Plus page is quite a bit like a Facebook page but with the added clout of Google Inc.’s search engine domination. It’s hard to imagine that businesses with a Google Plus presence won’t enjoy a little bump in their search engine results down the line.

On the “Facebook pages will triumph” side of the argument, people are saying that Facebook’s more than 700 million members will continue to be the draw that keeps businesses active on Facebook.

Those who believe Google Plus will ultimately win the battle are pointing to attractive elements like Direct Connect. Any pages built on Google Plus will be indexed and appear in Google search results. Even more intriguing, if you type in a business’s name and add the + symbol in front of it (+Toyota), the Google search bar will take you directly to the Google Plus page of that business. (This feature is slowly being activated, so be patient)

Will brands maintain duplicate content on Google and Facebook? Or will they use one as an advertising venue and the other as a customer service hub? There’s still plenty missing from Google Plus pages, but come on, it has only been around for a couple of weeks. There are two key reasons why I believe Google Plus pages is going to be a mandatory element for most businesses’ marketing efforts in the very near future.

Google’s scope: Google.com is the Web’s most visited website. We go there so often we’ve converted the company’s name into a verb.

The idea that a Google Plus page will elevate your standing in a Google search makes most brands salivate a little. Even more so, if you add a business’s page to your circles, it completely modifies any subsequent Google search to bring the Google Plus page up and indicate to you that you’ve already added it.

Google’s aim: One of the earliest differences between Google Plus and Facebook is the ability to deliver content to specific sub-groups within your followers. Google Plus circles allow you to categorize the people and brands you interact with so that you can be 100 percent specific and still be 100 percent relevant.

For example, assume a brand like Pampers has a Facebook fan page – the company pushes content to its page, and everyone who has liked the page will see it. Let’s say it wants to start a monthly feature of parenting tips. But each month, Pampers wants to have one tip specifically for moms and one for dads. On Facebook, the company would have to share all the tips with all of its fans. But with Google Plus, it could organize people into circles and share specific content.

Imagine how you would modify messages if you could break up your audiences into groups sharing geography, interests, their relationship with your company or even languages in common. It would certainly allow you to speak with great detail.

Certainly, Google Plus pages offer much more than these two aspects of the product. But these two alone make a pretty compelling argument for not ignoring the opportunity just because you don’t want to delve into yet another social media network. If you want to secure a Google Plus page for your business, go to https://plus.google.com/pages/create.

Drew McLellan is Top Dog at McLellan Marketing Group and blogs at www.drewsmarketingminute.com. He can be reached by email at Drew@MclellanMarketing.com. © 2011 Drew McLellan