The big news this week seems to be that Google+ now allows businesses and other organsiations to create a branded page. (This makes a radical change to the first few months of the network’s life, when any profile not associated with one specific human being was deleted).

So how do we go about launching a page for our organisations? Here are a selection of tips and tricks from around the web.

To get you started, Mashable has put together some slides which take you through the process of creating your page, step by careful step. You can see the slides here.

Already got your page going but not sure what to do now? Then it’s back to Mashable for another how to. This one covers various bits and bobs including how to link the page to your circles and find the page’s URL. Read the article here.

Another take on the set-up process comes from Duncan Parry in The Wall Blog. He gives a warts-and-all description of getting started, which could help the rest of us avoid some of these pitfalls. Here’s the link.

If you’re not sure whether to bother with G+ yet (or indeed, ever) then it may be helpful to read this op ed from UK Fundraising in which Sylwia Presley weighs up the pros and cons of being an early-ish adopter or a late one. She also gives some good examples of charities which have already taken the plunge and created G+ page. Read the article here.

For another POV, Gordon Macmillan (The Wall Blog) gives some more examples of well-known brands now getting their hands dirty with G+, as well as some more of the system’s imperfections. Read it here.

And finally, if you’re still dithering, Mashable reveals that finding G+ brand pages is now easy peasy… all you have to do is to add a plus sign before the name of the organisation in the standard Google search. This has got to start pushing more traffic towards Google’s own network. Here’s the link.

So am I going to be creating a Google+ page for GAVCA? Yes, probably. When I’ve got a few minutes…