While Google+ is still pretty new, there are quite a few cool tips
you can use to speed up how you use the site. There a few my favorites
have learned in the first tour three months the site online.
Notifications
Just like Twitter or Facebook, you can get quick updates to your phone. Unlike the other two, however, you can specialize your updates to a specific Circle.
Sharing Options on Steroids
Don’t just share things – share them with specific groups of people and then manage those comments like a pro. Targeted approaches will always work better than simply throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Navigation - want to quickly jump to the next item on your page? Press the “j” key. Want to go up? Press the “k” key. You can rotate your pictures easily by clicking the picture on the front and to scroll down the entire page is the space bar. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
Formatting – You can easily bold something by surrounding it with “**” and you can italicize with “_ _”. Strikethrough is another option if you use “- -“.
Drag and Drop Functionality – It’s incredibly easy to just drag and drop content from your computer or another web site and put them into your Google+ share box.
Shortcuts – Just like Twitter, you can reference people instantly by adding “+” before their name in your comments or shares. This facilitates much better interaction with the people in your Circles and allows you to quickly build up your brand on the site.
Locking Posts – You can easily lock a post and keep other people from sharing it with the “lock” button. Click the small arrow at the top right of a new post and choose the “disable comments” function.
This has more functionality in Google+ than other sites because if you share something with only one Circle this keeps people from commenting on or sharing that item with their own Circles. It would do you no good to keep something private only to have one of your contacts share it with the world.
Commenting – To leave a quick comment while reading something, press enter to start typing and then press enter again to stop typing – simple as that.
Mute Notifications – Have you ever made the mistake of commenting on a post on Facebook that was home to hundreds or even thousands of comments? Within minutes you scramble to learn how to turn off the notifications you receive from Facebook that a new comment was made. You can instantly mute these notifications in Google+ by clicking the following button after leaving a comment or posting a new share:
Adding Google+ to Chrome Search Options – You can actually set Google Chrome to search in Google+ from the URL bar at the top of your screen. This allows you to quickly and easily search on the site without having to open the window or login to Google+. Here’s how you do it:
Open chrome://settings/searchEngines in the URL bar at the top of the screen
Add a new entry that matches the type of search you want to perform:
Here’s a quick screenshot to show you what I’m talking about:
That’s it – now you can search in your search engine box for Google+ profiles or posts depending on what you want to look up.
Instead of being indignant and lording the control they have over your data around, Google has made it incredibly easy to customize your settings and pinpoint who you target and when. We’ve already covered Circles from a dozen different angles so now let’s look at what you can do with the other tools Google+ has brought to the party.
What to Show – Everything. Honestly, as a marketer, you shouldn’t be afraid to show anything about yourself online. You should ideally have a business phone line and email address (if not, use Google Voice and Gmail to set them up) and you should never share info like your home address, but otherwise, show everything you can safely show to make it easy for people to find you and contact you if necessary.
What NOT to Show – When I say everything, I mean almost everything. In truth, there are some things to hide, including the people who are in your Circles. Twitter doesn’t let you hide this and as a result, people can see how many people you’re following versus the people who are following you. That’s why building your follower count in Twitter takes so long – you don’t want that ratio to get out of whack too much. On Google+ you can choose to hide the number of people in your Circles and therefore stop this from even being an issue. A good trick here is to choose only one or two Circles to show the members of. It allows you to show some people without revealing that you’re following thousands of people for your marketing strategies.
View Profile As – I already mentioned this a bit before, but it’s worth talking about again because it’s so powerful. You can see exactly how someone else would see your profile – easy as that. Simply go to the Privacy Settings menu and look at the bottom for this option:
Check back once every 2-3 weeks to see what people see when they go to your profile page – this will allow you to avoid a lot of problems over time.
Simply go to your privacy options and click on “Data Liberation”:
You can now choose to download an archive of your data including:
Better yet, this service works well for backing up your other Google services, such as Gmail and Google Docs (though there are limitations on how much you can download and from where).
This makes Google+ an instantly better place to store things like photos and videos than other services like Flickr simply because it’s so easy to download everything you upload to your PC instantly. This is a great service and Facebook could learn something by how fast and easy it is to use.
Here’s a quick, cool feature that will allow you to engage with people on your normal web properties (like your blog or forums) and draw people back to Google+. One of the number one things I tell people over and over again is that they need to engage as many people as they can across as many of their web properties as they can.
So, when you have someone on your email list, get them to join you on your blog and on Google+. The more places you can reach them, the better.
Better yet, you can now create items out of every stream post on your Google+ account. Those comments and interactions are valuable, so why not use them for your marketing campaigns?
To share your post, right click on it and choose “link to this post” and you will be given a permalink. A permalink is a direct URL link that points to an element in a larger website.
In this case, you’ll be able to point people to what you’ve shared on Google+. This is useful if you want to streamline your messages into a single platform or if you plan on developing an ongoing platform through which people can reach you from anywhere.
Better yet, it convinces people who read your blog or are on your email list to sign up for and connect with you on Google+.
Keep in mind that some private posts cannot be linked to with permalinks – so if you really want to share them, they should be public or at least not locked.
Just because Google+ is a much better social network doesn’t mean you should throw your years of work out the window on Facebook and Twitter. Instead, use the tools built into all three services to automatically update each of them with posts from the others.
I don’t recommend syndicating posts from Facebook and Twitter to Google+ just yet as the privacy settings can get confused and everything is posted publically, but you can do it in reverse and then just use Google+ as your go to posting spot.
To do this, use Facebook’s Mobile update settings. Visithttp://www.facebook.com/mobile while logged in and get your accounts email address for mobile updates.
With this email address in hand, go back to Google+ and create a new Circle titled Facebook Update.
Once you add the email address you copied from Facebook Mobile, you can now update your Facebook Feed from Google+ without automatically sending every single update you make to Facebook (or cutting out the non-public ones).
Instead, you simply add the Facebook Circle you created to only the posts you want to share on Facebook and they are automatically emailed and updated to your Facebook feed – pretty slick, huh?
Twitter
Twitter can be updated the same way as Facebook, but you’ll need to do it using a third party tool like Twittermail which allows you to create a new email address that sends updates to your Twitter profile.
You’ll need to authorize it to access your Twitter profile and once you do, you’ll need to create a new email address. Then, simply do the same thing you did with Facebook, creating a new Circle titled “Twitter” and you can easily send updates to Twitter from your Google+ account, choosing which ones go there.
This is actually a bit more useful for Twitter than Facebook because you will find that many of your Google+ posts won’t be good for Twitter – they’re too long or filled with images and videos. So, being able to select which ones go to Twitter is incredibly useful.
It’s all fine and good to say that Google+ is bigger, better and more powerful than Facebook, but at the end of the day, all of your data is still sitting on a Facebook server somewhere, doing you absolutely no good. You need that information in Google+ and Facebook isn’t about to make it easy on you.
In fact, there have already been reports of Facebook blocking, crashing or simply refusing to link to Google+ properties…even if all you do is mention Google+.
For my money, that’s the ONLY sign I need that Google+ is a fantastic alternative to Facebook – those guys are nervous.
Anyways, back to the task at hand – we need to get the thousands of friends you have on Facebook off their and onto Google+.
Data Extraction
Facebook has, over the years, slowly opened up a bit of their backend to make it possible to access your data. Five years ago, we couldn’t even have this conversation because it was actually impossible to migrate off Facebook, but today there are options, albeit complicated, needlessly painful options.
The first on our list is the manual download option.
This allows you to download a copy of your Facebook data to your PC. This includes:
To do this, login to your account and find the Account Settings menu (under the “Account” button on the top right corner of your profile).
Look for the tiny link at the bottom of this page in the washed, kind of grey text that says “Download a Copy of Your Facebook Data”
Click that button and you’ll be able to now download everything from your profile.
Depending on how active you’ve been on Facebook, this can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 24 hours to complete. Some people have a LOT of stuff packed into that ZIP – plus Facebook needs to compile it all into a single folder from the vast array of secure servers it has cluttering North America.
Getting Your Data on Google+
When the zip folder is done compiling, you can download it from a link provided by Facebook (they’ll email you). Now it’s time to sort and upload to your new Google+ profile.
Getting photos into Google+ is actually very easy because Google+ uses the Picasa Web Album service as its backend. If you had any photos in your Picasa account before you setup your Google+ profile you probably noticed that many of the Public ones popped up unbidden.
That’s because Google+ will draw any images from your public profile on Picasa and put them directly into your scrapbook on Google+. It’s easy to manage though – you just need to change the privacy settings of your photos on Picasa to keep them from showing up.
So, when you get that huge ZIP from Facebook and go to upload them to your Google+ profile, you can either manually upload them through the Scrapbook interface or you can use the Picasa Web Albums desktop tool to grab all of your photos straight off your desktop and upload them directly to the Internet:
The latter is probably the easiest method unless you want to manually add things like tags and captions as you upload photos (or if you simply don’t have that many to upload in the first place).
To move your friends list, we need to get a little creative because Facebook is being stingy with its data here. While photos and videos are easy enough and Facebook has no control over what you do with them, your friends list is loaded with data that Facebook would prefer to keep on its own servers.
Fortunately, there are a few simple workarounds that have been successful since Google+ went live. The easiest is the Yahoo! Mail trick.
If you don’t have a Yahoo! Mail account, sign up for one now. Otherwise, login to your account and go to the “Contacts” tab at the top of the screen.
From here, choose “Import Contacts” and choose to import your Facebook Contacts directly to your Yahoo! Mail account.
After the standard Facebook Connect login, you’ll be able to instantly upload all of your Facebook contacts into Yahoo! Mail and as luck would have it, Yahoo! Mail can be imported directly into Google+. Voila, we just got around the needlessly complicated safeguards Facebook has erected to protect its data.
To add your Yahoo! Mail contacts to Google+, go to your Circles page and choose “Find People”. After you click the Yahoo! link, you can login to your Yahoo! Mail account and import your contact lists:
After you’ve imported everything, drag and drop everyone into their Circles and you’re set. Of course, anyone that doesn’t have a Google+ account won’t appear after the import, so remember to send invites to those people so you can continue to grow your network. It’s our job as much as Google’s to grow this network.
Other Options
Facebook is very protective of their data and doesn’t allow any apps or third party software tools to access data that you’d need to import from Facebook to Google+. So, if you notice a software tool or website offering this service, do your research. The last thing you want is to give away your account information to a third party that can’t actually get the job done.
The +1 button was announced much earlier than Google+ and at the time it drew only limited attention. It looked like a pale imitation of Facebook’s Like button and a late attempt by Google to integrate social feedback into their search results – something they’ve been trying to do for a couple years now.
But, as it turned out, the +1 button was a standalone tool. It was a precursor to the launch of Google+ and now a fantastic supplement to a new social network that is about to change how people find what they need in search.
If you thought search was complicated before, try to optimize your websites now, when social interactions and approval from users throughout the globe will have an impact on each individual SERP. It’s going to be a mess.
That is, unless you start optimizing early and learn how to take advantage of Google’s newest tools.
Take a quick look at your Profile (click your avatar icon in the top right corner of the screen):
Now, this is where you can see everything you’re doing online (that other people can also see). You have Posts, About, Photos, Videos, and +1’s. There’s also a tab for “Buzz” if you were one of the 25 people who actually updated their Buzz account on a regular basis.
I’m most interested in +1’s though because this is where we’re going to see the biggest overlap between social and search. As you can see, anything you’ve “+1’d” is now listed here. While Facebook has a similar function, theirs is limited to the websites that place “Like” buttons on their pages and the Fan Pages on Facebook that users “Liked”.
You can +1 anything you want as long as it shows up in the search results. Google has the immediate advantage in sharing through a dedicated button like this because it has indexed nearly every piece of content on the Internet.
The +1 button will serve two major purposes:
First, keep in mind that Google probably won’t change things overnight. This is Google we’re talking about. The company known for maintaining a perpetual beta on EVERYTHING they release. Their biggest failures were not due to a lack of creativity but to the fact that they really suck at rolling out new features.
Heck, Google+ was kind of just dumped on us, along with five or six other new tools on the exact same day. They’re engineers at heart and that means nothing gets done until they can do it right.
So, until Google can be sure that you, the intrepid marketer, are not capable of easily manipulating the results, they won’t shift too hard into the social arena.
But, when they do, here’s what I foresee happening:
Facebook and Bing? Not exactly an inspiring pair.
Like Facebook, Google allows you to quickly and easily add a +1 button to your website. You’ll find the tool in Google’s Webmaster interface at:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/
When you get started, choose the type and style of button you’d like to place on your site. If you already have Twitter and Facebook buttons, make sure to match the size and type so they appear similarly on your site.
Once you select the options that fit your button, copy and paste the code into your site following the directions given. It’s all pretty straightforward.
Since Google is Google, they’ve included a simple way to customize the snippet that appears on the Google+ accounts of those who +1 your page. So, instead of the default (the first few characters on the page), Google+ will display what you want it to:
Simply fill in the information provided here and paste it into the head of your website. Simple as that.
If you’re using Worpdress, there is a relatively straightforward plugin you can install called the Google +1 Button Plugin. Here’s a link for those that manually install their plugins:
WP Plus One
WP Plus One This
Google+ One Button
Plus One
The +1 button won’t allow you to spam or manipulate the search listings (trust me, plenty of people have already tried), but it will allow you to show case your interest in a topic to people on your list. The key is to think in advance for what people in your Circles will look for.
For example, if you have a Circle with only people interested in organic, gluten free dieting, you could use this to your advantage.
Search in Google for key terms that those prospects are most likely to search for. Things like:
Gluten free diet
Gluten free foods
Organic gluten free
Organic foods without gluten
Now, click the +1 button for the top five results for each of those keywords. Now, if anyone in your Circles searches for anything you +1’d, they’ll see your photo next to it. They’ll know you’re already ahead of them for that topic.
Of course, there are limits. If something in the top spot is obviously spam or a product for sale, don’t +1 it just to get exposure. Try to only +1 pages that are actually useful to your followers. This way, when someone sees the +1 they’ll think “man, this guy really knows his stuff” instead of “does he +1 everything?!”
Another useful strategy is to see what people in your Circles are +1’ing themselves. Since Google+ shows a list of recent +1’s made by the people in your Circles, you can review this information and see what they are looking at.
If you’re doing market research or trying to determine what people are most likely to search for in your niche, this is a fantastically effective way to do so, Google+ practically tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about your target prospects’ search strategies and makes it incredibly easy to reach out to them in small ways by posting similar content that they are then likely to +1 again.
Facebook provides a number of metric tools in their Insights backend service, but Google has them beat by miles when it comes to tracking and analyzing data. That’s why the integration of +1 statistics into Google Webmaster Tools is so fantastic.
You can see the ongoing search impact of your +1 buttons, including:
Annotated Impressions and Clicks
Improvement in Click Thru Rate
With and Without Numbers
Basically, you can see how each page on your site performed with and without Google +1 on its side. This allows you to not only measure the effects of each person that drops a +1 on your site, but see how well each page on your site does in response to the social integration of these tools.
We already know that Google is going to take the data from +1 into account. Now you can see how much of an impact that will actually have.
If you’re an SEO or work on boosting your listings, this is invaluable information. For everyone else, you should look into it – Google is changing social search.
Notifications
Just like Twitter or Facebook, you can get quick updates to your phone. Unlike the other two, however, you can specialize your updates to a specific Circle.
Sharing Options on Steroids
Don’t just share things – share them with specific groups of people and then manage those comments like a pro. Targeted approaches will always work better than simply throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Quick and Easy Shortcuts
Google loves shortcuts and Google+ is loaded with them. Here a few the simplest ones I’ve found so far.Navigation - want to quickly jump to the next item on your page? Press the “j” key. Want to go up? Press the “k” key. You can rotate your pictures easily by clicking the picture on the front and to scroll down the entire page is the space bar. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
Formatting – You can easily bold something by surrounding it with “**” and you can italicize with “_ _”. Strikethrough is another option if you use “- -“.
Drag and Drop Functionality – It’s incredibly easy to just drag and drop content from your computer or another web site and put them into your Google+ share box.
Shortcuts – Just like Twitter, you can reference people instantly by adding “+” before their name in your comments or shares. This facilitates much better interaction with the people in your Circles and allows you to quickly build up your brand on the site.
Locking Posts – You can easily lock a post and keep other people from sharing it with the “lock” button. Click the small arrow at the top right of a new post and choose the “disable comments” function.
This has more functionality in Google+ than other sites because if you share something with only one Circle this keeps people from commenting on or sharing that item with their own Circles. It would do you no good to keep something private only to have one of your contacts share it with the world.
Commenting – To leave a quick comment while reading something, press enter to start typing and then press enter again to stop typing – simple as that.
Mute Notifications – Have you ever made the mistake of commenting on a post on Facebook that was home to hundreds or even thousands of comments? Within minutes you scramble to learn how to turn off the notifications you receive from Facebook that a new comment was made. You can instantly mute these notifications in Google+ by clicking the following button after leaving a comment or posting a new share:
Adding Google+ to Chrome Search Options – You can actually set Google Chrome to search in Google+ from the URL bar at the top of your screen. This allows you to quickly and easily search on the site without having to open the window or login to Google+. Here’s how you do it:
Open chrome://settings/searchEngines in the URL bar at the top of the screen
Add a new entry that matches the type of search you want to perform:
| Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 | |
| Search in Posts | Google+ Posts | post | {google:baseURL}search?q=site:plus.google.com inurl:posts/* %s |
| Search in Profiles | Google+ Profiles | profile | {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&tbs=prfl:e |
That’s it – now you can search in your search engine box for Google+ profiles or posts depending on what you want to look up.
Privacy Settings
The one thing that has plagued Facebook more than anything else in the last five years is privacy. Google has had its fair share of privacy issues too (including a pair of lawsuits), but Facebook has been the public face of the problem and Google means not to duplicate those mistakes.Instead of being indignant and lording the control they have over your data around, Google has made it incredibly easy to customize your settings and pinpoint who you target and when. We’ve already covered Circles from a dozen different angles so now let’s look at what you can do with the other tools Google+ has brought to the party.
What to Show – Everything. Honestly, as a marketer, you shouldn’t be afraid to show anything about yourself online. You should ideally have a business phone line and email address (if not, use Google Voice and Gmail to set them up) and you should never share info like your home address, but otherwise, show everything you can safely show to make it easy for people to find you and contact you if necessary.
What NOT to Show – When I say everything, I mean almost everything. In truth, there are some things to hide, including the people who are in your Circles. Twitter doesn’t let you hide this and as a result, people can see how many people you’re following versus the people who are following you. That’s why building your follower count in Twitter takes so long – you don’t want that ratio to get out of whack too much. On Google+ you can choose to hide the number of people in your Circles and therefore stop this from even being an issue. A good trick here is to choose only one or two Circles to show the members of. It allows you to show some people without revealing that you’re following thousands of people for your marketing strategies.
View Profile As – I already mentioned this a bit before, but it’s worth talking about again because it’s so powerful. You can see exactly how someone else would see your profile – easy as that. Simply go to the Privacy Settings menu and look at the bottom for this option:
Check back once every 2-3 weeks to see what people see when they go to your profile page – this will allow you to avoid a lot of problems over time.
Google Takeout and Data Liberation
Just about the same time that Google+ was launching, another team at Google introduced Google Takeout which allows you to quickly and easily backup all of your data from your Google accounts. This is fantastic for getting your list off of Google+ and onto PC.Simply go to your privacy options and click on “Data Liberation”:
You can now choose to download an archive of your data including:
Better yet, this service works well for backing up your other Google services, such as Gmail and Google Docs (though there are limitations on how much you can download and from where).
This makes Google+ an instantly better place to store things like photos and videos than other services like Flickr simply because it’s so easy to download everything you upload to your PC instantly. This is a great service and Facebook could learn something by how fast and easy it is to use.
Sharing Off Site
Here’s a quick, cool feature that will allow you to engage with people on your normal web properties (like your blog or forums) and draw people back to Google+. One of the number one things I tell people over and over again is that they need to engage as many people as they can across as many of their web properties as they can.
So, when you have someone on your email list, get them to join you on your blog and on Google+. The more places you can reach them, the better.
Better yet, you can now create items out of every stream post on your Google+ account. Those comments and interactions are valuable, so why not use them for your marketing campaigns?
To share your post, right click on it and choose “link to this post” and you will be given a permalink. A permalink is a direct URL link that points to an element in a larger website.
In this case, you’ll be able to point people to what you’ve shared on Google+. This is useful if you want to streamline your messages into a single platform or if you plan on developing an ongoing platform through which people can reach you from anywhere.
Better yet, it convinces people who read your blog or are on your email list to sign up for and connect with you on Google+.
Keep in mind that some private posts cannot be linked to with permalinks – so if you really want to share them, they should be public or at least not locked.
Integrating with Facebook and Twitter
Just because Google+ is a much better social network doesn’t mean you should throw your years of work out the window on Facebook and Twitter. Instead, use the tools built into all three services to automatically update each of them with posts from the others.
I don’t recommend syndicating posts from Facebook and Twitter to Google+ just yet as the privacy settings can get confused and everything is posted publically, but you can do it in reverse and then just use Google+ as your go to posting spot.
To do this, use Facebook’s Mobile update settings. Visithttp://www.facebook.com/mobile while logged in and get your accounts email address for mobile updates.
With this email address in hand, go back to Google+ and create a new Circle titled Facebook Update.
Once you add the email address you copied from Facebook Mobile, you can now update your Facebook Feed from Google+ without automatically sending every single update you make to Facebook (or cutting out the non-public ones).
Instead, you simply add the Facebook Circle you created to only the posts you want to share on Facebook and they are automatically emailed and updated to your Facebook feed – pretty slick, huh?
Twitter can be updated the same way as Facebook, but you’ll need to do it using a third party tool like Twittermail which allows you to create a new email address that sends updates to your Twitter profile.
You’ll need to authorize it to access your Twitter profile and once you do, you’ll need to create a new email address. Then, simply do the same thing you did with Facebook, creating a new Circle titled “Twitter” and you can easily send updates to Twitter from your Google+ account, choosing which ones go there.
This is actually a bit more useful for Twitter than Facebook because you will find that many of your Google+ posts won’t be good for Twitter – they’re too long or filled with images and videos. So, being able to select which ones go to Twitter is incredibly useful.
Getting Your Data from Facebook to Google
It’s all fine and good to say that Google+ is bigger, better and more powerful than Facebook, but at the end of the day, all of your data is still sitting on a Facebook server somewhere, doing you absolutely no good. You need that information in Google+ and Facebook isn’t about to make it easy on you.
In fact, there have already been reports of Facebook blocking, crashing or simply refusing to link to Google+ properties…even if all you do is mention Google+.
For my money, that’s the ONLY sign I need that Google+ is a fantastic alternative to Facebook – those guys are nervous.
Anyways, back to the task at hand – we need to get the thousands of friends you have on Facebook off their and onto Google+.
Data Extraction
Facebook has, over the years, slowly opened up a bit of their backend to make it possible to access your data. Five years ago, we couldn’t even have this conversation because it was actually impossible to migrate off Facebook, but today there are options, albeit complicated, needlessly painful options.
The first on our list is the manual download option.
This allows you to download a copy of your Facebook data to your PC. This includes:
- Photos
- Videos
- Status Updates
- Messages
- Information on Your Profile
To do this, login to your account and find the Account Settings menu (under the “Account” button on the top right corner of your profile).
Look for the tiny link at the bottom of this page in the washed, kind of grey text that says “Download a Copy of Your Facebook Data”
Click that button and you’ll be able to now download everything from your profile.
Depending on how active you’ve been on Facebook, this can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 24 hours to complete. Some people have a LOT of stuff packed into that ZIP – plus Facebook needs to compile it all into a single folder from the vast array of secure servers it has cluttering North America.
Getting Your Data on Google+
When the zip folder is done compiling, you can download it from a link provided by Facebook (they’ll email you). Now it’s time to sort and upload to your new Google+ profile.
Getting photos into Google+ is actually very easy because Google+ uses the Picasa Web Album service as its backend. If you had any photos in your Picasa account before you setup your Google+ profile you probably noticed that many of the Public ones popped up unbidden.
That’s because Google+ will draw any images from your public profile on Picasa and put them directly into your scrapbook on Google+. It’s easy to manage though – you just need to change the privacy settings of your photos on Picasa to keep them from showing up.
So, when you get that huge ZIP from Facebook and go to upload them to your Google+ profile, you can either manually upload them through the Scrapbook interface or you can use the Picasa Web Albums desktop tool to grab all of your photos straight off your desktop and upload them directly to the Internet:
The latter is probably the easiest method unless you want to manually add things like tags and captions as you upload photos (or if you simply don’t have that many to upload in the first place).
Contacts
To move your friends list, we need to get a little creative because Facebook is being stingy with its data here. While photos and videos are easy enough and Facebook has no control over what you do with them, your friends list is loaded with data that Facebook would prefer to keep on its own servers.
Fortunately, there are a few simple workarounds that have been successful since Google+ went live. The easiest is the Yahoo! Mail trick.
If you don’t have a Yahoo! Mail account, sign up for one now. Otherwise, login to your account and go to the “Contacts” tab at the top of the screen.
From here, choose “Import Contacts” and choose to import your Facebook Contacts directly to your Yahoo! Mail account.
After the standard Facebook Connect login, you’ll be able to instantly upload all of your Facebook contacts into Yahoo! Mail and as luck would have it, Yahoo! Mail can be imported directly into Google+. Voila, we just got around the needlessly complicated safeguards Facebook has erected to protect its data.
To add your Yahoo! Mail contacts to Google+, go to your Circles page and choose “Find People”. After you click the Yahoo! link, you can login to your Yahoo! Mail account and import your contact lists:
After you’ve imported everything, drag and drop everyone into their Circles and you’re set. Of course, anyone that doesn’t have a Google+ account won’t appear after the import, so remember to send invites to those people so you can continue to grow your network. It’s our job as much as Google’s to grow this network.
Other Options
Facebook is very protective of their data and doesn’t allow any apps or third party software tools to access data that you’d need to import from Facebook to Google+. So, if you notice a software tool or website offering this service, do your research. The last thing you want is to give away your account information to a third party that can’t actually get the job done.
The +1 Button
The +1 button was announced much earlier than Google+ and at the time it drew only limited attention. It looked like a pale imitation of Facebook’s Like button and a late attempt by Google to integrate social feedback into their search results – something they’ve been trying to do for a couple years now.
But, as it turned out, the +1 button was a standalone tool. It was a precursor to the launch of Google+ and now a fantastic supplement to a new social network that is about to change how people find what they need in search.
If you thought search was complicated before, try to optimize your websites now, when social interactions and approval from users throughout the globe will have an impact on each individual SERP. It’s going to be a mess.
That is, unless you start optimizing early and learn how to take advantage of Google’s newest tools.
Take a quick look at your Profile (click your avatar icon in the top right corner of the screen):
Now, this is where you can see everything you’re doing online (that other people can also see). You have Posts, About, Photos, Videos, and +1’s. There’s also a tab for “Buzz” if you were one of the 25 people who actually updated their Buzz account on a regular basis.
I’m most interested in +1’s though because this is where we’re going to see the biggest overlap between social and search. As you can see, anything you’ve “+1’d” is now listed here. While Facebook has a similar function, theirs is limited to the websites that place “Like” buttons on their pages and the Fan Pages on Facebook that users “Liked”.
You can +1 anything you want as long as it shows up in the search results. Google has the immediate advantage in sharing through a dedicated button like this because it has indexed nearly every piece of content on the Internet.
The +1 button will serve two major purposes:
- Sharing interesting information with your followers
- Boosting the status of your own web properties by soliciting +1’s from people
First, keep in mind that Google probably won’t change things overnight. This is Google we’re talking about. The company known for maintaining a perpetual beta on EVERYTHING they release. Their biggest failures were not due to a lack of creativity but to the fact that they really suck at rolling out new features.
Heck, Google+ was kind of just dumped on us, along with five or six other new tools on the exact same day. They’re engineers at heart and that means nothing gets done until they can do it right.
So, until Google can be sure that you, the intrepid marketer, are not capable of easily manipulating the results, they won’t shift too hard into the social arena.
But, when they do, here’s what I foresee happening:
- Unique +1’s Matter – You want as many unique, diverse people as possible to +1 your web properties. And because every page of your site can be +1’d in the SERPs, you want more than just the homepage. Similar to how we approach backlinking, diversity in +1’s will be important.
- Return Visits – Since everyone will be perpetually logged into their Google accounts, Google will be increasingly able to track what people do and when. Return visits and time on site will play a much larger role in rising in SERPs.
- Viral Impact – In the past, Google’s response to viral content was always delayed. If something spread rapidly across the Internet, it may not show up in SERPs right away because the backlinks needed to be indexed. If something receives 10,000 +1’s, however, Google knows immediately to bump it in the listings because it is increasingly relevant to a big audience.
- Indexed Mentions of Your Company – This relates more to people mentioning and +1’ing your company on Google+. If links to your site appear on the social network and people +1 them repeatedly, expect positive results to come pouring in for your SERPs.
Facebook and Bing? Not exactly an inspiring pair.
Adding Google +1 Button to Your Pages
Like Facebook, Google allows you to quickly and easily add a +1 button to your website. You’ll find the tool in Google’s Webmaster interface at:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/
When you get started, choose the type and style of button you’d like to place on your site. If you already have Twitter and Facebook buttons, make sure to match the size and type so they appear similarly on your site.
Once you select the options that fit your button, copy and paste the code into your site following the directions given. It’s all pretty straightforward.
Since Google is Google, they’ve included a simple way to customize the snippet that appears on the Google+ accounts of those who +1 your page. So, instead of the default (the first few characters on the page), Google+ will display what you want it to:
Simply fill in the information provided here and paste it into the head of your website. Simple as that.
WordPress
If you’re using Worpdress, there is a relatively straightforward plugin you can install called the Google +1 Button Plugin. Here’s a link for those that manually install their plugins:
WP Plus One
WP Plus One This
Google+ One Button
Plus One
Google +1 Button Tricks
The +1 button won’t allow you to spam or manipulate the search listings (trust me, plenty of people have already tried), but it will allow you to show case your interest in a topic to people on your list. The key is to think in advance for what people in your Circles will look for.
For example, if you have a Circle with only people interested in organic, gluten free dieting, you could use this to your advantage.
Search in Google for key terms that those prospects are most likely to search for. Things like:
Gluten free diet
Gluten free foods
Organic gluten free
Organic foods without gluten
Now, click the +1 button for the top five results for each of those keywords. Now, if anyone in your Circles searches for anything you +1’d, they’ll see your photo next to it. They’ll know you’re already ahead of them for that topic.
Of course, there are limits. If something in the top spot is obviously spam or a product for sale, don’t +1 it just to get exposure. Try to only +1 pages that are actually useful to your followers. This way, when someone sees the +1 they’ll think “man, this guy really knows his stuff” instead of “does he +1 everything?!”
Checking their +1’s
Another useful strategy is to see what people in your Circles are +1’ing themselves. Since Google+ shows a list of recent +1’s made by the people in your Circles, you can review this information and see what they are looking at.
If you’re doing market research or trying to determine what people are most likely to search for in your niche, this is a fantastically effective way to do so, Google+ practically tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about your target prospects’ search strategies and makes it incredibly easy to reach out to them in small ways by posting similar content that they are then likely to +1 again.
Google +1 Data Analysis
Facebook provides a number of metric tools in their Insights backend service, but Google has them beat by miles when it comes to tracking and analyzing data. That’s why the integration of +1 statistics into Google Webmaster Tools is so fantastic.
You can see the ongoing search impact of your +1 buttons, including:
Annotated Impressions and Clicks
Improvement in Click Thru Rate
With and Without Numbers
Basically, you can see how each page on your site performed with and without Google +1 on its side. This allows you to not only measure the effects of each person that drops a +1 on your site, but see how well each page on your site does in response to the social integration of these tools.
We already know that Google is going to take the data from +1 into account. Now you can see how much of an impact that will actually have.
If you’re an SEO or work on boosting your listings, this is invaluable information. For everyone else, you should look into it – Google is changing social search.
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