While Facebook recently loosened up its promotional guidelines to make it easier for marketers to administer promotions on individual pages, Google+ is still pretty buttoned up. The contest policy on Google+ is pretty straightforward. In short, businesses and publishers are not allowed to:

• run contests, sweepstakes or other promotions directly on Google+ unless pre-approved
• promote prizes or monies in exchange for a +1 on Google
• display any third-party advertising on their page

What You Can do on Google+

But just because you can’t host or run a promotion directly on Google+ doesn’t mean you should ignore the marketing and SEO opportunity that sharing your promotions on Google+ presents.

Fortunately, you are allowed to display a link to your promotion on your page. As we mentioned in our post on Why Google Plus Matters to Your Business, links posted on Google+ will be “crawled”, greatly improving the chance they will be ranked in Google search. Therefore, sharing your promotion across channels including Google+ is an important step in helping your promotion get noticed.

How to Get Your Promotion Noticed on Google+

Contests are searchable on Google+, but the ones that stand out include an image or multiple images, an enticing description, a link to the contest site, and a hashtag.

If your contest involves submissions of user-generated content, as entries come in, you can share select entries on your Google+ page with your hashtag and direct people back to your contest site to see more.

Here are a few example of creative ways brands have used Google+ to spread the word about their promotions:

SmugMug

SmugMug, which enables businesses and families to create a website that houses their photos, is running a sweepstakes in partnership with Bay Photo and Chris Burkard Studios.

SmugMug has grown its Google+ audience to 71,812 followers, posting every day or so. For this promotion, it included a beautiful image of its prize - a photograph, of course - with a brief description and a link to the promotion details and entry form. So far, 67 people have +1 the posting and 17 people have shared it on their own pages. It used the hashtags #MondayMotivation, #Waves, #Landscape #Travel.

The Frugal Girls

Run by a Phoenix-based blogger, The Frugal Girls blog shares tested tips and tricks for living well on less. In addition to highlighting deals, recipes and great offers, it runs numerous giveaways. Its latest, launched on October 22, is a sweepstakes promotion for a $100 gift card to crafting supplies store Michaels.

The Frugal Girls share new posts several times a day on Google+, and while this sweepstakes post has only garnered three pluses so far, with over 9,000 followers on Google+, it’s sure to get good exposure, particular given it uses the hashtags #giveaways #contests #michaels #frugalgirls.

Engadget

An online tech magazine providing daily coverage of all things electronic, Engadget has attracted a large audience on Google+, with nearly 2 million followers.

Its High Above sweepstakes offered the chance to win a ride in a private jet to Expand, its biannual conference for technology enthusiasts. The prize package also included a three-night hotel stay in New York City and the choice of an iPhone5 or a Samsung Galaxy Note 3.

The contest link was posted several times on Google+ and linked back to the Facebook contest page, which required entrants to like its Facebook page in order to enter the sweepstakes. Google+ posts were tagged with the hashtags #HighAbove and #win.