If you’ve logged into Google+ lately you may have noticed a new tab called Events. This is a feature similar to Facebook where you can invite people to go to your party or charity event via your social media account.

Here are a couple features that might get you to finally start using Google+ and bring your friends along with you:

1. Invitation Themes

Instead of having the same boring look each time, you have the ability to customize the theme of your invitation. There are several pictures to choose from in different categories, even some with animation. Pictures range from a birthday cake with a glowing candle to a steak on the grill. You can also upload your own photos or use ones currently in your Google+ account.

2. View Events on Google Calendar

If you already use Google Calendar to keep track of your busy schedule, this will make planning parties and events even more seamless. Your circles will be able to respond to the invite and have it added to their calendar without having to do extra work.

3. Invite Your Circles and Other Google+ Users

One of the most cumbersome features of the Facebook invite is the need to individually click each friend to add them to the event. This can take forever depending on how many friends you have. If you are a business trying to invite all followers to an open house or special sale, this can be almost impossible.

With Google+ events, you can invite all of the people in your circles with a few clicks (similar to how you choose who to share information with). You can also invite people not in your circles by looking up their name. This is useful if you want to include an old friend you ran into on the street but haven’t connected with yet.

This feature is getting some scrutiny, however, as many celebrities on Google+ had events automatically added to their calendars when the feature was first introduced. Because they were being spammed and voiced their concerns to Google+, many power users with a lot of people in their circles are only able to be invited if you are in their circle.

4. Share Instantly With Party Mode

How many times have you been at a party, had an awesome picture taken of you, and waited a month before your friend finally posted the pictures on Facebook? With Google+ events, that is now a thing of the past. With Party Mode, attendees can take pictures and instantly upload them to a shared feed. Everyone invited will immediately have access to all pictures and be able to share them on their own feed or save them to their computer.

Google+ events will not only benefit users with personal accounts, but will also be a useful tool to companies on Google+. A prime example is a company that all 220 Employees have in their circles. They invited all employees to an event to visit their website at a certain time on a certain day to get the most simultaneous visits to their website possible. While some of us were annoyed with the spam that automatically popped up on our calendars, we all remembered the name of the company and it became a topic everyone was discussing.

It will benefit your company to take advantage of events to invite people to visit your website, like your Facebook page, attend an open house for one of your properties, or to promote any offers you may have for them to take advantage of.

Do you think you will be using this new feature anytime soon? What do you think is the best feature? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

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