Google+ Cheat Sheet: A Fast Track Approach to Effectively Building Your G+ Network
With Google+ now out of field testing mode and open to the public to join, the user base is set to take a huge leap forward. Those who have been holding off on joining because they wanted to see if it would survive or because they didn’t have an invite will now start to join the G+ ranks.
This has a few implications. First, it means a new platform upon which to branch out and network, to make new connections and get your message heard by an audience. Social media had already made these audiences accessible like never before, and now Google+ brings yet another channel to that ever-flowing waterway. That’s the exciting part, the good news.
Unfortunately, it also means having to establish yourself on a whole new network all over again. You have already spent hours and days and weeks and probably even years building up your reputation and contacts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Now you have to start all over – what a drag.
True, that would be a drag, if done the wrong way. You’re not going to do it the wrong way, though, because you were smart enough to obtain this report. Once you’re done reading through this Cheat Sheet, you will be well armed to build an extensive, effective network of your own on Google+.
You will have learned strategies to add new contacts to your network, import and maintain your existing contacts from other networks, effectively organize your Google+ network and build solid relationships with your fellow “Plussers.”
The goal is to provide you with a fast track to making connections, starting with finding people of interest, then building Circles for your connections and finally enticing people to connect to you.
Before we begin, just allow me to make a couple quick notes:
The report is intended to give you a brief overview of how to get a leg up on building your Google+ network. It is not an all-encompassing guide to using Google+, and it assumes a certain level of baseline knowledge of the network.
Google has designed it social network for individuals, not businesses per se. These strategies will work just fine whether your goal is to find more clients for your business or just build a bigger network of acquaintances, but keep in mind that however you use Google+, you should do so as an individual. You may represent your business as the individual you are, but Google+ does not currently support “business pages.”
OK, that takes care of all the dry stuff. Now it’s time to take this new tool out of its case and see what it can do. Let’s start at the beginning and start making some connections.
Making Connections
The Google+ relationship dynamic is a little more like Twitter than Facebook or LinkedIn, because connections are asymmetrical by default. By that I mean that you can add a Google+ member to one of your Circles without them having to do the same, like following someone on Twitter. Of course, they can also add you to one of their Circles, thereby making the relationship symmetrical.
What this means is that finding people to connect to is relatively easy. Google+ is over the ten million user mark and counting, so there is no shortage of people for you to connect to at the moment. You might say this is the easy part.
The best way to start is to re-establish on Google+ the connections that you have already built on other platforms—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your email address book, etc. There are two obstacles on this path:
There’s no singular way to scan all your various contact lists and import them at once, so the process is largely piecemeal.
Not everyone has adopted Google+ yet.
However, these are just obstacles, and here in the Internet, virtually no obstacle is so big that we can’t work around it or at least game plan for it.
Google Suggestions
It should come as no surprise to anyone who uses Google products that G+ is designed to integrate with your accounts for other Google services, including mining your Gmail contact list for suggestions. This manifests itself in a few different ways.
First, when you create your Google+ account, one of the first screens you encounter will be one suggesting people for you to add to your Circles. This group of 50 or so people comes from your Gmail contact list and includes your contact themselves, contacts of your contacts and people whom your contacts have added to their circles. The result is a big hodgepodge of people whom you may or may not know, so be selective when combing through them.
Also, when you are logged into Google+, you will usually see some suggestions of people to add along the right side of your home page:
These again are mined from your Gmail contacts. Also, when you go to the Circles tab to search for people and create your own Circles – which we’ll get into in more depth in a moment – Google+ will offer even more suggestions based on your Google contact data.
So, if there are people among your Google contacts with whom you would like to connect on G+, it will not be difficult to do. In fact, I would be rather difficult to avoid. That means it’s as good a place as any to start building your network.
(Note: just because someone has a Google account does not necessarily mean they have joined Google+. In the screenshot above, for example, the suggested accounts have generic icons up instead of profile pictures. More often than not, that means they are Gmail contacts who have not yet joined Google+. You can still add them to a Circle and send them an invitation to join G+, but you will not be able to interact with the directly on G+ until they join.)
Import from Facebook
If you are like many people – about 750 million and counting, in fact – you probably have huge chunk of your contact information stored on Facebook. You will want to move these connections into Google+, no doubt, because you have already worked hard to build those relationships.
Unfortunately, because Facebook protects its data, there is no direct way to import your contacts into Google+. There is, however, a way to work around that using Yahoo! mail.
Enter your Yahoo! account information and follow a few on-screen prompts to finish the migration process.
Adding Other Contacts
Now that you have your Gmail and Facebook contacts added to your circles, it’s time to start adding more manually. Here’s a sample checklist of platforms where you may have existing relationships that you want to continue on Google+:
Experts, Gurus and Thought Leaders
Just like other social networking and marketing platforms, one of the best ways to start branching your network outward is to find and embrace prominent leaders in your field, as well as related fields.
Google+ makes this pretty easy out of the box when it suggest public figures you might be interested in during the account creation process. For example, in the figure above, Google+ has recommended adding such prominent online gurus and thought leaders as Guy Kawasaki, Steven Levy and Larry Page.
Chances are that if you have been using other social networks for any length of time, you have already found and connected to at least some thought gurus in your niche. If you haven’t, for whatever reason, let me give you one recommendation: do it!
There are lots of ways to research who the top thought leaders in a given field are, but one of my favorite is to see who is the most active and popular on Twitter. Online directories such as TweetTop.com and WeFollow.com have categorized, searchable and comprehensive lists of the top Tweeters among myriad industries and fields of interest. For example, here’s a shot of TweetTop’s “Blogging” section:
So, if you’re a blogger, you can see right away who the major players are in the blogosphere.
“Wait a minute,” you’re saying. “This is a Twitter directory. I thought we were talking about Google+.” Of course we are, but I understand your confusion. Let me show you how you can make use of this information within Google+. To do that, take a glimpse at this screenshot of who WeFollow thinks are the top “Entrepreneur” Tweeters:
Right away you recognize some names here, like chronic Tweeter Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs (@iamdiddy). Feel free to look these guys up on G+ if you want, but they’re not our target for the moment.
Look at #5. It’s Guy Kawasaki. Remember how we saw him pop up earlier on Google+? Here’s a reminder:
See? Not surprisingly, there is some overlap between the two networks. What does that mean for us as budding G+ networkers and marketers?
It means that by cross-referencing directories like WeFollow or TweetTop, we can do two things:
Find prominent gurus and thought leaders on Twitter, then see if they are also on Google+ to add to our own Circles.
See if someone we already know is on Google+, but whom we may not be familiar with, is worth connecting to—like we just did with Mr. Kawasaki.
Whichever method you choose to familiarize yourself with the leaders in your field or niche, you can’t really go wrong by finding them and connecting with them. This helps you tap into a network of like-minded individuals, which can become part of your network in time.
Next, let’s talk about how you can make some of these direct connections.
Swiping New Connections
Now that you have connected to some of these leaders and popular public figures, guess what: you’re not the only one who has added them to Circles. What’s more, the others who have added these characters to their circles will likely have similar interests as you do, which therefore makes them potential clients or customers in the future. At the least, it makes them a good audience to have.
So, one way to build an audience and grow your Google+ network is to use those crowds as a resource. Let me show you how this works, again using Guy Kawasaki as our example.
This is a shot of Guy’s G+ profile. It looks just like yours: profile picture in the top left corner, scrapbook photos along the top, stream down the middle and so on.
Now, see the little area labeled “Have Guy in circles” with some thumbnails? That section is link to all the people who have added Guy to one of their circles. Those are the people we want to connect with. Click the “View all” link to see more. That brings up a dialog box, the top of which looks like this:
You now have access to everyone who has an interest in what Guy Kawasaki has to say – all 150,000+ of them! Guy is an expert on start-ups, so a lot of the people who follow him are entrepreneurs or have an interest in entrepreneurship. So, if for example you have written an eBook guide to starting your own business, some of these people are going to be right in your target audience. And you just found them in only a few minutes!
To begin adding them to your Circles, click the “Add to circles” button next to each profile picture:
A word of caution: don’t add more than 100 or so new people to your Circles per day, lest you appear to be some sort of bot. Having access to this many potential contacts in an instant is great, but remember it’s about making connections, not just mindlessly adding people to your network like a machine.
That’s a quick overview to help you get started building your network, but how do you keep track of all the various connections you make as your network grows? That’s where Circles come in.
Organize Your Circles
One of the most powerful features of Google+ is the ability to organize your contacts in Circles, or groups of contacts categorized however you choose. If you’re familiar with Twitter lists, think those, but on steroids.
By default, G+ creates Circles called Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following. (The last is for adding people you may not know, but whose content you are interested in, like public figures.) You can make as many Circles as your wish, however, and label them by whatever convention you like. For example, you’ll notice that in the screen shot above, I’ve made a circle called “Prospects,” where I can keep track of potential clients. Some examples of Circles you may want to create include:
That covers how to find people to follow and how to keep those contacts organized, but the real goal is to get people to connect to you. Well, the first two sections have been leading up to that. After all, you can’t expect people to just flock to you, you’ve got to go find them—hence why we went over that first.
Now, though, it’s time to get some followers of your own.
Getting Followers
Like any other endeavor seeking an audience, the key to social networking is to spark an interest. People have to want to hear what you have to say, and in order for that to happen, you need to say something interesting. There’s no magic bullet to social media, but that’s about as close as any idea comes to one.
Posting Content
It shouldn’t surprise you that people want to see content from the folks they follow on Google+. More importantly, they want to see good content. Anyone can fill up a Stream with post after post of gobbledygook, but that’s just obnoxious. So what constitutes good content?
Honestly, that just means things that people are interested in. Link to your own blog posts as well as others. Add in links to relevant sources of information, like videos and classes. In short, say something useful and people will listen.
Who’s Listening?
Remember earlier when I talked about how cool Circles are? Now we’re going to see them in action a little bit.
One of the reasons we built Circles was to target our content to specific audiences. You will find that not every Circle needs to say all your posts. For example, when you post that you are offering a 20% discount on your eBook to all new customers, that won’t be of much interest or use to the people in your Current Customers Circle. The people in your Prospects or Target Audience Circle, however, might find it irresistible.
Likewise, there are some times you will want to broadcast a message to a broader audience. If you have a marketing message intended to reach out and lure in new business, then you will want it out there for the community at large to see. For those posts, you can choose to make the post Public, meaning that everyone is able to see it.
Report Your Whereabouts
This may seem obvious, but one of the simplest ways to get followers on a new network is also one that is frequently overlooked.
Just tell your followers on other networks. Fire off a Tweet. Put a post up on LinkedIn. Write a short blog post about it. Link to your Google+ profile in your Facebook status, along with a friendly note:
(I used Guy’s Google+ profile again here, but you get the idea. You can just as easily substitute a link to your own.)
With Google+ now open to the public, lots of people are beginning to adopt it, but you can’t just wait one everyone to assume you made the transition and come looking for you. You’re a marketer, remember? That means sending a message, so hop on those other networks and send it!
I never cease to be amazed by the people who miss this step in the process of building a social network. While we’re on the subject, let’s talk about some other “obvious” strategies to facilitate connections and foster relationships.
The “Obvious” Stuff
Complete Your Profile.Take a look at the following profile:
Aside from the fact that you can’t read the name (it’s been obliterated to protect the innocent), what do you notice about it? There’s nothing there! No posts, no scrapbook photos, not even a profile picture. I have no idea who this person is or what they are about. Would you bother connecting to this person?
Because I sure wouldn’t. Fill your profile out as completely as possible. Put up a professional, pleasant profile picture. Add some photos to your scrapbook. The idea is to convey an image of a real person who people will actually want to connect to.
Frequent Posts
I’ve already told you about the importance of content, but it bears repeating. Post content early and often, so that people know you have a pulse. Putting up some sort of update – a link, a blog post, even just a text status update – at least once a day keeps your Stream active and your followers interested.(Beware posting too often, however.
There’s nothing like a Stream clogged with too-frequent updates to turn people off in a hurry.)
Interact
This is rule #1 of social media. People join social networks because the like the sense of community and the communication that takes place there. It’s a reciprocal, give-and-take process. That means that you are expected to engage within the community in an interactive fashion. Don’t just toss some posts up and be done with it; interact with the other members. Google+ is great for this because it provides several different avenues by which to interact:
+1 Button
Giving a post a +1 means that you like or endorse what it is about. In general, give +1’s to get them, but don’t offer to sell or exchange them. That’s a big no-no.
Commenting
Like what someone had to say in a post? Tell them!
Also, make it a point to respond to comments on your posts. It’s polite and reinforcing. SharingSharing is a way to add something that someone has already posted to your stream. If you share something someone has posted, it will become visible to your Circles as well as theirs.
Tagging
In Facebook and Twitter, you can tag someone in a post by preceding their name or handle with the “@” symbol. Similarly, in Google+ you can tag someone by typing “+NAME.” Give it a try. People like shout outs. By using some of these simple tips and tricks, you will attract more followers and develop stronger relationships with the ones you already have.
Quick Tips & Tricks
What’s a cheat sheet without some little tips and tricks thrown in? Here are some that will help you get around in Google+:
Easy Sharing
The “Share what’s new…” box contains several icons for adding media to your Stream posts. To simplify the process, you can also drag links and pictures directly into the box. It works with most things on the Web – although not everything – so experiment. It’s kind of cool and a fun little time saver.
The Other “Circular File”
You know how sometimes you find stuff online that you want to keep for later reading or sharing, or just for reference, but you don’t know where to put it?
Try this trick.
Create a new Circle, but don’t add anybody to it. You can call the circle “Save for Later” or “Storage” or anything else that will be easy to remember. When you run into a post you like on G+, share it, but only with that circle. That way you can refer back to it later.(I’m sure this isn’t the only creative use for Circles. Try some other techniques too!)
Emphasize!
Avid users of GChat will be familiar with this one. When you post stuff on Google+, there’s no option to format the text. However, you can add emphasis with a few extra characters. For italics, add an underscore (_) to each end of the text you want to emphasize: _like this_. Use asterisks (*) for bold text, and dashes (-) to strikethrough.
Permalinks
You can link to G+ posts on other sites by using the permalink for that post, which – like on Facebook – is not necessarily intuitively found. To link directly to a post, click on the date that it was posted, located to the right of the poster’s name. This will take to the specific page for that post. Copy and paste the URL from the address bar to share the post on other sites.
In Closing
As an Internet marketer, you comprise your own brand. The best way to build, grow and develop your brand image is to form meaningful, lasting connections in a network. It has been my goal throughout this report to help you do that, at least from a Google+ standpoint. The approach we went over is a quick and effective way to build your Google+ network. As a brief reminder, a summary of this fast track approach goes like this: Make connections, by both finding old contacts and reaching out to new ones. Organize your Circles. Close the loop by attracting followers of your own.
If you do these things, you will find your network growing ever wider over time. It won’t happen overnight, but it will be much quicker than you probably expected. Now get out there and start connecting.
With Google+ now out of field testing mode and open to the public to join, the user base is set to take a huge leap forward. Those who have been holding off on joining because they wanted to see if it would survive or because they didn’t have an invite will now start to join the G+ ranks.
This has a few implications. First, it means a new platform upon which to branch out and network, to make new connections and get your message heard by an audience. Social media had already made these audiences accessible like never before, and now Google+ brings yet another channel to that ever-flowing waterway. That’s the exciting part, the good news.
Unfortunately, it also means having to establish yourself on a whole new network all over again. You have already spent hours and days and weeks and probably even years building up your reputation and contacts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Now you have to start all over – what a drag.
True, that would be a drag, if done the wrong way. You’re not going to do it the wrong way, though, because you were smart enough to obtain this report. Once you’re done reading through this Cheat Sheet, you will be well armed to build an extensive, effective network of your own on Google+.
You will have learned strategies to add new contacts to your network, import and maintain your existing contacts from other networks, effectively organize your Google+ network and build solid relationships with your fellow “Plussers.”
The goal is to provide you with a fast track to making connections, starting with finding people of interest, then building Circles for your connections and finally enticing people to connect to you.
Before we begin, just allow me to make a couple quick notes:
The report is intended to give you a brief overview of how to get a leg up on building your Google+ network. It is not an all-encompassing guide to using Google+, and it assumes a certain level of baseline knowledge of the network.
Google has designed it social network for individuals, not businesses per se. These strategies will work just fine whether your goal is to find more clients for your business or just build a bigger network of acquaintances, but keep in mind that however you use Google+, you should do so as an individual. You may represent your business as the individual you are, but Google+ does not currently support “business pages.”
OK, that takes care of all the dry stuff. Now it’s time to take this new tool out of its case and see what it can do. Let’s start at the beginning and start making some connections.
Making Connections
The Google+ relationship dynamic is a little more like Twitter than Facebook or LinkedIn, because connections are asymmetrical by default. By that I mean that you can add a Google+ member to one of your Circles without them having to do the same, like following someone on Twitter. Of course, they can also add you to one of their Circles, thereby making the relationship symmetrical.
What this means is that finding people to connect to is relatively easy. Google+ is over the ten million user mark and counting, so there is no shortage of people for you to connect to at the moment. You might say this is the easy part.
The best way to start is to re-establish on Google+ the connections that you have already built on other platforms—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your email address book, etc. There are two obstacles on this path:
There’s no singular way to scan all your various contact lists and import them at once, so the process is largely piecemeal.
Not everyone has adopted Google+ yet.
However, these are just obstacles, and here in the Internet, virtually no obstacle is so big that we can’t work around it or at least game plan for it.
Google Suggestions
It should come as no surprise to anyone who uses Google products that G+ is designed to integrate with your accounts for other Google services, including mining your Gmail contact list for suggestions. This manifests itself in a few different ways.
First, when you create your Google+ account, one of the first screens you encounter will be one suggesting people for you to add to your Circles. This group of 50 or so people comes from your Gmail contact list and includes your contact themselves, contacts of your contacts and people whom your contacts have added to their circles. The result is a big hodgepodge of people whom you may or may not know, so be selective when combing through them.
Also, when you are logged into Google+, you will usually see some suggestions of people to add along the right side of your home page:
These again are mined from your Gmail contacts. Also, when you go to the Circles tab to search for people and create your own Circles – which we’ll get into in more depth in a moment – Google+ will offer even more suggestions based on your Google contact data.
So, if there are people among your Google contacts with whom you would like to connect on G+, it will not be difficult to do. In fact, I would be rather difficult to avoid. That means it’s as good a place as any to start building your network.
(Note: just because someone has a Google account does not necessarily mean they have joined Google+. In the screenshot above, for example, the suggested accounts have generic icons up instead of profile pictures. More often than not, that means they are Gmail contacts who have not yet joined Google+. You can still add them to a Circle and send them an invitation to join G+, but you will not be able to interact with the directly on G+ until they join.)
Import from Facebook
If you are like many people – about 750 million and counting, in fact – you probably have huge chunk of your contact information stored on Facebook. You will want to move these connections into Google+, no doubt, because you have already worked hard to build those relationships.
Unfortunately, because Facebook protects its data, there is no direct way to import your contacts into Google+. There is, however, a way to work around that using Yahoo! mail.
- Open a Yahoo! Mail account, or log into an existing one.
- In the Yahoo! account, go to the Contacts tab. Click “Import Contacts” and choose to import contacts via Facebook.
- Back in Google+, go to the Circles tab.
- Once there, make sure you are in the “Find people” section and click the link to find friends from Yahoo!
Enter your Yahoo! account information and follow a few on-screen prompts to finish the migration process.
Adding Other Contacts
Now that you have your Gmail and Facebook contacts added to your circles, it’s time to start adding more manually. Here’s a sample checklist of platforms where you may have existing relationships that you want to continue on Google+:
- Email address books (other than Gmail)
- Existing client lists
- Email or RSS subscribers to your blog
- Your phone contact list
Experts, Gurus and Thought Leaders
Just like other social networking and marketing platforms, one of the best ways to start branching your network outward is to find and embrace prominent leaders in your field, as well as related fields.
Google+ makes this pretty easy out of the box when it suggest public figures you might be interested in during the account creation process. For example, in the figure above, Google+ has recommended adding such prominent online gurus and thought leaders as Guy Kawasaki, Steven Levy and Larry Page.
Chances are that if you have been using other social networks for any length of time, you have already found and connected to at least some thought gurus in your niche. If you haven’t, for whatever reason, let me give you one recommendation: do it!
There are lots of ways to research who the top thought leaders in a given field are, but one of my favorite is to see who is the most active and popular on Twitter. Online directories such as TweetTop.com and WeFollow.com have categorized, searchable and comprehensive lists of the top Tweeters among myriad industries and fields of interest. For example, here’s a shot of TweetTop’s “Blogging” section:
So, if you’re a blogger, you can see right away who the major players are in the blogosphere.
“Wait a minute,” you’re saying. “This is a Twitter directory. I thought we were talking about Google+.” Of course we are, but I understand your confusion. Let me show you how you can make use of this information within Google+. To do that, take a glimpse at this screenshot of who WeFollow thinks are the top “Entrepreneur” Tweeters:
Right away you recognize some names here, like chronic Tweeter Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs (@iamdiddy). Feel free to look these guys up on G+ if you want, but they’re not our target for the moment.
Look at #5. It’s Guy Kawasaki. Remember how we saw him pop up earlier on Google+? Here’s a reminder:
See? Not surprisingly, there is some overlap between the two networks. What does that mean for us as budding G+ networkers and marketers?
It means that by cross-referencing directories like WeFollow or TweetTop, we can do two things:
Find prominent gurus and thought leaders on Twitter, then see if they are also on Google+ to add to our own Circles.
See if someone we already know is on Google+, but whom we may not be familiar with, is worth connecting to—like we just did with Mr. Kawasaki.
Whichever method you choose to familiarize yourself with the leaders in your field or niche, you can’t really go wrong by finding them and connecting with them. This helps you tap into a network of like-minded individuals, which can become part of your network in time.
Next, let’s talk about how you can make some of these direct connections.
Swiping New Connections
Now that you have connected to some of these leaders and popular public figures, guess what: you’re not the only one who has added them to Circles. What’s more, the others who have added these characters to their circles will likely have similar interests as you do, which therefore makes them potential clients or customers in the future. At the least, it makes them a good audience to have.
So, one way to build an audience and grow your Google+ network is to use those crowds as a resource. Let me show you how this works, again using Guy Kawasaki as our example.
This is a shot of Guy’s G+ profile. It looks just like yours: profile picture in the top left corner, scrapbook photos along the top, stream down the middle and so on.
Now, see the little area labeled “Have Guy in circles” with some thumbnails? That section is link to all the people who have added Guy to one of their circles. Those are the people we want to connect with. Click the “View all” link to see more. That brings up a dialog box, the top of which looks like this:
You now have access to everyone who has an interest in what Guy Kawasaki has to say – all 150,000+ of them! Guy is an expert on start-ups, so a lot of the people who follow him are entrepreneurs or have an interest in entrepreneurship. So, if for example you have written an eBook guide to starting your own business, some of these people are going to be right in your target audience. And you just found them in only a few minutes!
To begin adding them to your Circles, click the “Add to circles” button next to each profile picture:
A word of caution: don’t add more than 100 or so new people to your Circles per day, lest you appear to be some sort of bot. Having access to this many potential contacts in an instant is great, but remember it’s about making connections, not just mindlessly adding people to your network like a machine.
That’s a quick overview to help you get started building your network, but how do you keep track of all the various connections you make as your network grows? That’s where Circles come in.
Organize Your Circles
One of the most powerful features of Google+ is the ability to organize your contacts in Circles, or groups of contacts categorized however you choose. If you’re familiar with Twitter lists, think those, but on steroids.
By default, G+ creates Circles called Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following. (The last is for adding people you may not know, but whose content you are interested in, like public figures.) You can make as many Circles as your wish, however, and label them by whatever convention you like. For example, you’ll notice that in the screen shot above, I’ve made a circle called “Prospects,” where I can keep track of potential clients. Some examples of Circles you may want to create include:
- Thought Leaders – For those gurus and other influential people we talked about above, like Guy Kawasaki.
- Audience – People possibly interested in your products or services, whom you are working on forging a connection with. You could drop the new connections you scrape into this Circle initially, for example.
- Customers – Speaks for itself.
- Conversationalists – People with whom you interact on a regular basis. You may know them personally or just bounce ideas off each other online.
- Etc., etc., etc.
That covers how to find people to follow and how to keep those contacts organized, but the real goal is to get people to connect to you. Well, the first two sections have been leading up to that. After all, you can’t expect people to just flock to you, you’ve got to go find them—hence why we went over that first.
Now, though, it’s time to get some followers of your own.
Getting Followers
Like any other endeavor seeking an audience, the key to social networking is to spark an interest. People have to want to hear what you have to say, and in order for that to happen, you need to say something interesting. There’s no magic bullet to social media, but that’s about as close as any idea comes to one.
Posting Content
It shouldn’t surprise you that people want to see content from the folks they follow on Google+. More importantly, they want to see good content. Anyone can fill up a Stream with post after post of gobbledygook, but that’s just obnoxious. So what constitutes good content?
Honestly, that just means things that people are interested in. Link to your own blog posts as well as others. Add in links to relevant sources of information, like videos and classes. In short, say something useful and people will listen.
Who’s Listening?
Remember earlier when I talked about how cool Circles are? Now we’re going to see them in action a little bit.
One of the reasons we built Circles was to target our content to specific audiences. You will find that not every Circle needs to say all your posts. For example, when you post that you are offering a 20% discount on your eBook to all new customers, that won’t be of much interest or use to the people in your Current Customers Circle. The people in your Prospects or Target Audience Circle, however, might find it irresistible.
Likewise, there are some times you will want to broadcast a message to a broader audience. If you have a marketing message intended to reach out and lure in new business, then you will want it out there for the community at large to see. For those posts, you can choose to make the post Public, meaning that everyone is able to see it.
Report Your Whereabouts
This may seem obvious, but one of the simplest ways to get followers on a new network is also one that is frequently overlooked.
Just tell your followers on other networks. Fire off a Tweet. Put a post up on LinkedIn. Write a short blog post about it. Link to your Google+ profile in your Facebook status, along with a friendly note:
(I used Guy’s Google+ profile again here, but you get the idea. You can just as easily substitute a link to your own.)
With Google+ now open to the public, lots of people are beginning to adopt it, but you can’t just wait one everyone to assume you made the transition and come looking for you. You’re a marketer, remember? That means sending a message, so hop on those other networks and send it!
I never cease to be amazed by the people who miss this step in the process of building a social network. While we’re on the subject, let’s talk about some other “obvious” strategies to facilitate connections and foster relationships.
The “Obvious” Stuff
Complete Your Profile.Take a look at the following profile:
Aside from the fact that you can’t read the name (it’s been obliterated to protect the innocent), what do you notice about it? There’s nothing there! No posts, no scrapbook photos, not even a profile picture. I have no idea who this person is or what they are about. Would you bother connecting to this person?
Because I sure wouldn’t. Fill your profile out as completely as possible. Put up a professional, pleasant profile picture. Add some photos to your scrapbook. The idea is to convey an image of a real person who people will actually want to connect to.
Frequent Posts
I’ve already told you about the importance of content, but it bears repeating. Post content early and often, so that people know you have a pulse. Putting up some sort of update – a link, a blog post, even just a text status update – at least once a day keeps your Stream active and your followers interested.(Beware posting too often, however.
There’s nothing like a Stream clogged with too-frequent updates to turn people off in a hurry.)
Interact
This is rule #1 of social media. People join social networks because the like the sense of community and the communication that takes place there. It’s a reciprocal, give-and-take process. That means that you are expected to engage within the community in an interactive fashion. Don’t just toss some posts up and be done with it; interact with the other members. Google+ is great for this because it provides several different avenues by which to interact:
+1 Button
Giving a post a +1 means that you like or endorse what it is about. In general, give +1’s to get them, but don’t offer to sell or exchange them. That’s a big no-no.
Commenting
Like what someone had to say in a post? Tell them!
Also, make it a point to respond to comments on your posts. It’s polite and reinforcing. SharingSharing is a way to add something that someone has already posted to your stream. If you share something someone has posted, it will become visible to your Circles as well as theirs.
Tagging
In Facebook and Twitter, you can tag someone in a post by preceding their name or handle with the “@” symbol. Similarly, in Google+ you can tag someone by typing “+NAME.” Give it a try. People like shout outs. By using some of these simple tips and tricks, you will attract more followers and develop stronger relationships with the ones you already have.
Quick Tips & Tricks
What’s a cheat sheet without some little tips and tricks thrown in? Here are some that will help you get around in Google+:
Easy Sharing
The “Share what’s new…” box contains several icons for adding media to your Stream posts. To simplify the process, you can also drag links and pictures directly into the box. It works with most things on the Web – although not everything – so experiment. It’s kind of cool and a fun little time saver.
The Other “Circular File”
You know how sometimes you find stuff online that you want to keep for later reading or sharing, or just for reference, but you don’t know where to put it?
Try this trick.
Create a new Circle, but don’t add anybody to it. You can call the circle “Save for Later” or “Storage” or anything else that will be easy to remember. When you run into a post you like on G+, share it, but only with that circle. That way you can refer back to it later.(I’m sure this isn’t the only creative use for Circles. Try some other techniques too!)
Emphasize!
Avid users of GChat will be familiar with this one. When you post stuff on Google+, there’s no option to format the text. However, you can add emphasis with a few extra characters. For italics, add an underscore (_) to each end of the text you want to emphasize: _like this_. Use asterisks (*) for bold text, and dashes (-) to strikethrough.
Permalinks
You can link to G+ posts on other sites by using the permalink for that post, which – like on Facebook – is not necessarily intuitively found. To link directly to a post, click on the date that it was posted, located to the right of the poster’s name. This will take to the specific page for that post. Copy and paste the URL from the address bar to share the post on other sites.
In Closing
As an Internet marketer, you comprise your own brand. The best way to build, grow and develop your brand image is to form meaningful, lasting connections in a network. It has been my goal throughout this report to help you do that, at least from a Google+ standpoint. The approach we went over is a quick and effective way to build your Google+ network. As a brief reminder, a summary of this fast track approach goes like this: Make connections, by both finding old contacts and reaching out to new ones. Organize your Circles. Close the loop by attracting followers of your own.
If you do these things, you will find your network growing ever wider over time. It won’t happen overnight, but it will be much quicker than you probably expected. Now get out there and start connecting.
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