Friday, March 28, 2014

Promo Friday: Making Google+ Work For You

First off, why get involved with Google+?


Nobody's over there, right? Well, your friends from high school probably aren't. Or your neighbors or members of your church. If you're interested in professional-type content rather than pictures of cats, Google+ might be the place to find it. It's definitely an easy place to organize it. Google+ allows you to organize your contacts into "circles," categorized the way you want to categorize them. I, for instance, have self-publishing circles, marketing/promotional circles, and blogger circles. I can easily bring up each circle so that content is all I see on the page in front of me. I can take in a lot of information, easily.

How about getting my information out on Google+? Last week, I said I was going to check out Julia DeNeen's tutorial on crafting content for Google+. What you want to do on Google+, as with any other social platform, is get a message out to as many people as possible so you can develop some name recognition. DeNeen's tutorial can definitely help you do it.

This past week I've been doing only a few of the things DeNeen suggests, and I've definitely seen an improvement in my plus 1's (people sharing my posts) and an uptick in people adding me to their own circles. People, particularly people I don't know, sharing my content gets my name out in front of more people I don't know. People I don't know adding me to their circles so that my posts will be coming up on their walls regularly means that they'll see my name over and over. Name recognition.

What have I been doing?

  • I've been reposting all my blog posts at Google+ for a while. After watching DeNeen's tutorial, I've been much more serious about introducing them with a summary. That way, readers don't have to click through to my post to find out what it's about. This makes a great deal of sense in terms of the little I know about communication theory. The receiver of a message shouldn't have to work too hard. Without a good summary to give receivers an idea of what's on the other side of that link, they're forced to do the work of discovering it themselves. A lot of readers won't. (Myself included.)
  • I link to Google+ users whose work I'm discussing in my post in the summary. I had no idea how to do that. Never even occurred to me to try.
  • I now know how to use bold text.
I'll have to watch the tutorial again to figure out how to use images. But given the results I've had with what I have been doing, I think it would be worth it.

Next week I hope to cover everything I've been doing wrong at Twitter.

4 comments:

tanita✿davis said...

I pulled this post aside to reread -- I keep thinking I really ought to do something about Google+ -- I had no intention of using it, but since I've had to learn to use Hangout while my sister was recovering from surgery at home (when you're 17 and bereft of company, you will, in fact, even speak to your sister) I realize it might be the answer to showing up on some kind of social media but with having more control over who I appear to be. Thanks for this -- I'll keep thinking on it, at least...

Gail Gauthier said...

I've done nothing with hangouts, so you're ahead of me there. As I said, I find Google+ more professional, but I definitely make an effort to connect with people who are posting professional material. Everyone treats Facebook pretty much as a watercooler spot to check out personal stuff. It makes someone who works at home all day feel as if she "knows" people, but it's not particularly helpful professionally.

Gail Gauthier said...

By the way, Tanita, I do visit your blog. I just can't comment there for some reason.

tanita✿davis said...

☺ Sorry about the lack of being able to comment; I was really heavily spammed for a long while, so you basically have to sign up with not WordPress but my site to comment. Usually the permissions go pretty fast, but it's another hoop to jump through, I realize. I have recently lowered the threshold so people can do it more easily, but... yeah.