Nov 21, 2014
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How to get into the right “circles” with Google social media
I do a lot of work with Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, and I’ve heard the debates on whether Google+ has turned out to be successful or not. Let me be clear, Google+ is one of the easiest ways to gain visibility and engagement and in a lot of ways, I see it as more effective than Facebook (yes I heard you gasp).
Communities
Here’s the key word when it comes to visibility and engagement on Google+: communities. Google+ allows you to search for groups of people that share common interests and it allows you to join those groups as a business. For example, if I like travel, I can search for “travel” in the communities section and groups pop up.
Here are the first five options that popped up:
1. Traveling: 170, 473 members
2. Travel Around the World: 132,030 members
3. Travel Photography: 123,431 members
4. Travel Photography: 200,479 members
5. Travel Talk: 31,958 members
I can join every single one of these groups and post content on them. That means gaining access to over 660,000 people and it’s access for free. Plus, if you’re a small business, it means visibility with large numbers of people, which you’d be paying through the nose for on Facebook. Believe me, if you do it right, your engagement will follow your visibility trend.
Differentiate your content
Differentiate your content for each community: Having instant access to thousands of people can be an exciting thing, so people often go crazy spamming multiple communities. Realize that if you post in a community, it automatically posts on your own page, so if you go spamming communities with the same exact post, your own page will look like junk and have an endless stream of the same exact post. I ran across a company on Google+ the other day that had nine posts of the same exact post back to back on their own page because they didn’t realize this (see some of it below). Can you see how bad that looks?
Don’t stress about your own profile page content
I haven’t exclusively posted to my client’s actual page in months because I’m always posting in communities and each community. It’s good to check your page to make sure it looks good… but don’t worry about posting to your own people because they’ll still see it when you post to communities.
I’ve listened to the debates as to what is and what is not a waste of time in terms of social media. I think part of the problem lies in the fact that there aren’t any hard fast rules to social media (for the most part). It depends on your business and what your objectives are. Don’t throw Google+ to the side because it didn’t live up to the dreams of killing Facebook. You’ll pay for it… literally.