How important is Google Plus - Specifically for B2B Small Businesses?

[Zippy-Bungle]

Our traffic is about 300 visitors a day in a small industrial niche. We have 89 wonderful facebook followers (all friends and no customers) and basically social media is of no interest to our audience. The same is true of all our competitors - we all have twitter accounts, FB accounts etc and they are resolutely ignored by our customers. [For a combination of Industry Sector, Language, Culture, Business Culture and Job Role]

That's not the question though

No one has any Google Plus followers either and no +1's on pages.

So if I get 10 +1's on a page will that make any difference? Would 50? Would 500?

How much effort should I put in to this? As we are not an e-commerce revenue isn't tied directly to website traffic but there is a correlation. So is it worth spending a bit of time to develop a 'natural distribution' of +1's and then reach out to my contacts to get them to plus 1 me?

That is I use lots of different google accounts, with different IPs on different pages at different times and slowly build

Or do i just say that this part of the SEO approach is of no benefit and I ignore?

[EcommerceSite]

"Matt Cutts of Google responded to this thread on Hacker News to imply +1s aren't used directly in Google's algorithm.

While I take Matt at his word that Google doesn't use raw +1s to rank webpages, the evidence seems to suggest Google+ posts do pass other SEO benefits not found easily in other social platforms. If this is not the case, I'm hoping Google will clarify.

Mark Traphagen said it best in this comment:

It is not the +1's themselves that are causing the high rankings of posts but the fact that most +1's on a site result in a shared post on Google+, which creates a followed link back to the post. It's instant organic link building.

The point is not to go out and accumulate a bunch of +1s.The point is, and the evidence seems to suggest, that_earning a link on Google+ is like earning any other type of editorial link_, and these links have actual value with real benefits."

I would try and use Google Plus but not put a lot of effort in getting the actual +1s. If you do any sort of content marketing on your website Google Plus is a really quick way to get it indexed.