You have probably already heard that Google+ has now opened for business pages, rather than just personal pages, so I wanted to take a quick look to see what was going on. The process is actually very simple.
You have to have a personal Google+ account - Google wants to link the page to a specific person. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because it's linking an invididual to an organisation - what happens when they leave? I suppose you could create a 'fake' account which could be looked after by various individuals in the library, but there's always the slight possibility that Big G might find this out and get rather annoyed, so horses for courses.
Next, you go to https://plus.google.com/u/0/pages/create which looks like this:
Choose a category for your library page, fill in the name and URL, select a category and you're done. A very simple process from the look of it. However, you don't want to stop at that point - that's like creating a Twitter account but not putting in a photograph or biographical details, and no-one is that silly are they? (Cue Tumbleweeds...) Get some photographs, logo, create some circles (maybe staffers, members, experts in subject areas), add links to your other social media accounts, and send out some status messages welcoming people! There's nothing worse that going to a page and seeing that nothing has been shared - which is all too common at the moment.
So, what do you do with it next? No good twiddling your thumbs, since you want to attract people to the page. Post content - as much as you can do. Remember - you may well be attracting people who don't know much about your library, so you need to entice them in. Interact with people - add them, put them in circles, check out your local community, see if anyone else has a G+ page and add them.
Think about the activities that you could associate with your account - reading groups for example. Create a reading circle and link to videos, discussions, author home pages and so on. Create hangouts in order to talk to members - have homework club evenings for example, and share links to school resources, webpages and so on.
I suspect that a lot of people are muttering and saying that they don't have time. I get that, really I do, but the point is that if you don't do it, you're going to miss the boat entirely. You want to get in right at the start, so that you can leverage that position, encourage people to join you on G+, have somewhere ready and waiting for them. Be a familiar face for when they do join, as they will at some point. Maybe you want to wait until some other libraries have taken the plunge? Well guess what - they already have, and not just American ones either. Here's a list which is I'm sure not complete, so if you know of more, please let me know:
John Rylands University Library
Waterford City Council Library Services
Those are just the UK/Ireland ones that I've found - there's another forty or so American libraries that have created pages as well. I've shared the entire list on my Google+ update status, so if you're following me you'll see it. If you're not and want to, you can find me at http://gplus.to/philbradley
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