New businesses join google+ everyday and promote their brand using google+ pages. Yesterday we shared about Cadbury’s UK success story using pages.

Business pages offer new tools like hangouts and hangouts on air to connect and interact with your customers. In order to ensure quality of the network and compliance with all applicable federal, state and local laws, google+ has set some promotion policies.

One of the important policy to note is you are not allowed to directly run any contests, sweepstakes, offers, coupons or promotions on your google+ page.

However they allow to share links to pages that may contain any of the above (they reserve the right to remove posts / content that has direct promotional material). Just want to give a heads up before you scratch your head why that post disappeared.

Here is the google+ pages contest and promotion policy

You may not run contests, sweepstakes, offers, coupons or other such promotions (“Promotion”) directly on your Google+ Page. You may display a link on your Google+ Page to a separate site where your Promotion is hosted so long as you (and not Google) are solely responsible for your Promotion and for compliance with all applicable federal, state and local laws, rules and regulations in the jurisdiction(s) where your Promotion is offered or promoted. Your Promotion must not be run or conducted in a way which conflicts with the +1 Button Policies, Privacy Policy or Google+ Pages Additional Terms of Service. Google has the right to remove your Promotion content from Google+ Page for any reason.

Here is the best practice : If you decide to run a contest, sweepstakes, coupon or promotion just create details about your offerings on your own website, blog or pages outside google+ and share the link on google+ pages.

The result is same but you are playing safe by adhering to promotion policies. Hope this helps while planning your next promotion campaign.