Last week, an invitation to Google+ landed in my inbox and I thought, I really do not want to waste my time keeping up on another social media platform. However, curiosity and the nature of my job finally got me to sign up and play around with it. While it seems to be a very basic version of Facebook (at the moment), the function of the circles really sets it apart. But could this really become the social media tool of choice for businesses interacting with their prospects and customers?

Of course, I am not able to answer this at this point, but it does have a lot of potential in business, marketing, and support environments. Here are some possible uses floating around in my head:

• Create circles for internal groups to broadcast communications to your team, send product and other updates, or even make it a corporate communication tool.
• Segment prospects and leads with the intent to send targeted and more personalized content. You could slice and dice circles by job function, vertical, product interest, geography, etc. According to MarketingSherpa, 67 percent of prospects say content targeted to their job function is valuable to them, and that number increases to 82 percent for industry-specific content.
• Segment customers to provide personalized service and support, as well as to identify up-sell opportunities. By segmenting circles, you could aggregate and monitor messages from your customers more efficiently and respond to them more effectively. This would allow you to gather feedback for new product development, finding of defects or uncovering problems sooner. You could then react by pushing out pro-active service notifications, outage updates, up-sell offers or discount coupons, which leads to happier and more loyal customers.

I am curious to see how businesses will implement the Google+ circles into their business model and in what innovative ways Google+ Brands allows companies to interact with their inner circles (Ford Motor’s “Hangout”). The use cases are endless. Of course, it all depends on the adoption rate compared with Facebook and what improvements Google releases in the coming months, but the potential is definitely there.