One of the more powerful and useful features of Google+ is its use of
Circles. With Circles, you can organize your Google+ contacts into
different groups based on your relationship with them. This can have
several advantages. For example:
You can filter what you see in your Stream by Circle, so you can see only the user content that is relevant to you at any one time.
Likewise, you can designate your content to be visible only one or more Circles, so you can tailor it to appeal to certain audiences.
Circles serve as a reminder of how you know or are connected to someone, lest you forget.
You can keep your whole network of contacts, colleagues, customers and prospects organized easily into their corresponding Circles.
This is just a short list of the uses for Circles, and as you can probably see, there are some great marketing and promotion implications hidden in there as well. To tap into the marketing potential of Google+, let’s talk about how to build targeted Circles.
Getting Started With Circles
In order to have targeted Circles, you must have Circles to begin with. So, let’s start by creating some Circles.
First, click on the Circles tab from your Google+ home page, or any Google+ page. It is the second button from the right in the collection of tabs, as indicated in red below.
Once you are at the Circles tab, click on the “Find people” section. This where you will go to – surprise! – find people to add to your circles. You will see a large pool of suggestions from Google+ of people you may know and/or want to add. Unfortunately, I’ve had to block out faces and names in the screenshot below in order to protect the innocent, but you get the idea. Each of those little rectangles will have a picture and name in it.
As you can see, there are four pre-fabricated Circles already: Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following. Not a bad start. Let’s make a new one.
To make a new Circle, you just need to add at least one person to it. See how that one person is highlighted in blue above? We’re going to make him the first contact in our new circle. To do this, we simply drag him down to the empty Circle on the far left, the one that says “Drag contacts here to create a new circle.”
As you do that, the empty circle will expand and become highlighted in blue to indicate being selected.
After dragging one person to that Circle, you have the option to either add more people by dragging, or go ahead and create the Circle by clicking the corresponding link. Add as many people as you like before continuing.
That brings up this brief dialog box:
Here, you can name your Circle and confirm the people you want in it before finalizing its creation. At this point, you may be wondering just what adding someone to a Circle does. Good question. I’m going to let Google answer that one for me:
So, now we can share things with the guy we just added to our new “Prospects” Circle. He will receive notification that we have added him to a Circle, but he won’t know which Circle it is. So, if you wanted to have a Circle called “Poisonous Enemies” or “Ignore at all costs,” you could do it without hurting anyone’s feelings. Although, I don’t know why you would keep a connection to people like that, but that’s up to you.
Targeted Circles
Now that you know how to create Circles, you can go about setting up ones that are targeted. For example, we just created one called “Prospects,” which you can now use to keep track of prospective sales leads. You could also create one called “Current Customers,” containing everyone who has an open account with your business. Once our guy from up above makes a purchase, we move him over to that Circle. Depending on your business, you might want to have Circles like:
Making use of Google+ Circles is a powerful way to step up your customer relations and marketing campaigns.
You can filter what you see in your Stream by Circle, so you can see only the user content that is relevant to you at any one time.
Likewise, you can designate your content to be visible only one or more Circles, so you can tailor it to appeal to certain audiences.
Circles serve as a reminder of how you know or are connected to someone, lest you forget.
You can keep your whole network of contacts, colleagues, customers and prospects organized easily into their corresponding Circles.
This is just a short list of the uses for Circles, and as you can probably see, there are some great marketing and promotion implications hidden in there as well. To tap into the marketing potential of Google+, let’s talk about how to build targeted Circles.
Getting Started With Circles
In order to have targeted Circles, you must have Circles to begin with. So, let’s start by creating some Circles.
First, click on the Circles tab from your Google+ home page, or any Google+ page. It is the second button from the right in the collection of tabs, as indicated in red below.
Once you are at the Circles tab, click on the “Find people” section. This where you will go to – surprise! – find people to add to your circles. You will see a large pool of suggestions from Google+ of people you may know and/or want to add. Unfortunately, I’ve had to block out faces and names in the screenshot below in order to protect the innocent, but you get the idea. Each of those little rectangles will have a picture and name in it.
As you can see, there are four pre-fabricated Circles already: Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following. Not a bad start. Let’s make a new one.
To make a new Circle, you just need to add at least one person to it. See how that one person is highlighted in blue above? We’re going to make him the first contact in our new circle. To do this, we simply drag him down to the empty Circle on the far left, the one that says “Drag contacts here to create a new circle.”
As you do that, the empty circle will expand and become highlighted in blue to indicate being selected.
After dragging one person to that Circle, you have the option to either add more people by dragging, or go ahead and create the Circle by clicking the corresponding link. Add as many people as you like before continuing.
That brings up this brief dialog box:
Here, you can name your Circle and confirm the people you want in it before finalizing its creation. At this point, you may be wondering just what adding someone to a Circle does. Good question. I’m going to let Google answer that one for me:
So, now we can share things with the guy we just added to our new “Prospects” Circle. He will receive notification that we have added him to a Circle, but he won’t know which Circle it is. So, if you wanted to have a Circle called “Poisonous Enemies” or “Ignore at all costs,” you could do it without hurting anyone’s feelings. Although, I don’t know why you would keep a connection to people like that, but that’s up to you.
Targeted Circles
Now that you know how to create Circles, you can go about setting up ones that are targeted. For example, we just created one called “Prospects,” which you can now use to keep track of prospective sales leads. You could also create one called “Current Customers,” containing everyone who has an open account with your business. Once our guy from up above makes a purchase, we move him over to that Circle. Depending on your business, you might want to have Circles like:
- Past Customers
- Advertisers
- Freelancers
- Editors
- Subscribers
- Buyers of Product X, Buyers of Product Y, etc.
- Priority List
Making use of Google+ Circles is a powerful way to step up your customer relations and marketing campaigns.
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