Did you receive an invite from Google to create your own page on Google+? If you have such an invite from Google, you may have felt a desire to explore it further and prioritize the creation of your own page on the Google+ community before anything else. The opening of brand pages by Google made many people and organizations curious to have their own page on the Google+ community. Google+ allows you to create and manage your own page under your account. With its significance in search, this new initiative from Google aims at redefining the way social sharing takes place.
So, now you do not have to stick to your strategies for only LinkedIn, HackerNews, Facebook, Quora and Twitter but you have to chart out a strategy for your Google+ account as well. The following are some tips to increase your engagement with your Google+ community:
1. Develop a habit for checking and responding to notifications
There is no doubt that you may be checking your notifications on a regular basis. However, the question is whether you respond to the notifications. You should check and respond to as much notifications as possible on daily basis. You should grab this opportunity to let people know that you are always there and you care about what people say about you or brand.
When responding to notifications, you can thank someone who shares your post; you can respond to persons who shares post with you, you can write comments if someone mentions you in his or her comments or you can simply add people in your circle if reasonable.
2. Search for your name, brand and keywords and respond
To ensure that you stay engaged with your community, you need to know what other people say about you. You can run a simple search to see people, posts, pages and hangouts. However, you can filter your search to only Google+ posts to know the latest buzz in your community. Searching for your name, brand and keyword gives you an opportunity to reach out to your Google+ community and know what the community is talking about.
3. Check Ripples for your content
Using Ripples, you can see and connect with your influencers. Google has made Ripples more useful by adding some upgrades. The enhanced Ripples allow you to see all shares for a specific shared page. It does not restrict the visibility of Ripples for only a single share. In addition, it gives you the flexibility to add any URL for seeing and checking the Ripples.
4. Make direct reference to other brands and people
As you keep hunting for posts that mention your brand and name, other individuals and companies do the same thing. Therefore, develop a habit for mentioning brands and names of other people or companies. When making a reference to people, you should connect directly with event speakers, blog authors and community members.
When someone gets a personal notification, they will surely take some actions. They will either comment or reshare the post. Connecting with brands and people has been made very simple with Google+. You do not need to be an active member in the circles with brands and people to connect with them. You can do this by commenting on the posts of others or placing your own post.
5. Initiate a hangout or chat
Google+ has made the interaction with other people easy and quick by enabling you to connect with someone directly. Google+ is a great place to initiate a chat or something similar to reach out to your customers or community members. In addition to chat, you can also hold a hangout with up to 10 persons on Google+. To initiate a hangout, you need to have a functional microphone and a webcam. You also need to install Google video and voice plugin.
6. Add people in your circle
The circle feature of Google+ is in the core of the management of online relationships. You will have four circles to start with Google+— Acquaintances, Following, Family and Friends. To add any suggested contact to your circle, you need to drag that contact to a circle. You can add a contact that is not suggested by clicking the “Add a new person” button.
7. Manage your circles
After adding persons to the initial circles, you can now fine-tune your circles further and add new circles to your Google+ account. Google+ gives you the flexibility to add people to more than one circle. Every person that is added to your circle will receive a notification. However, this notification does not tell them which circle they are added to. For ease of use, you can manage your Google+ circles by dividing them by interest or appending prefixes with circles and sub-circles.
8. Share your stream with community members
Using Google+, you can share your location, pictures, videos, links and thoughts without worrying about the character limit. The absence of character limit on Google+ allows you to take the liberty to be as detailed in your post as you think fit. A number of formatting options let you write your post in the desired format. Google+ also allows you to post only visuals on your account.
9. Interact and share
Google+ is in no way less social than Twitter or Facebook. To get the best out of Google+, interact with persons you have followed. You can click the +1 button for anything that appeals you, post a comment and share or re-share posts from Google+ members. When you share a post of any Google+ member, the post divides into its own links, allowing you to have five different interactions on a single story. This could be very interesting because every shared link has its own dedicated audience.
It is advisable to adopt a well thought-out strategy to manage your Google+ community due to its significance in search. It not only allows you to establish an interaction with your fans and audience, it also enables you to reach out to your clients and customers and perform a number of other things. However, it should be kept in mind that a social strategy that works well for an individual or a company may not produce the desired result for another person or company. Therefore, it is advisable to test any social strategy for their efficacy. With several innovative features, hangouts and circles, Google+ is here to make a mark.
About the author: Claudia is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on luxury and technology. She recently read an article on Google Chrome that attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on Larry Page.