Should Google+ Be Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy?

Some of you may have already jumped into Google+. According to recent stats, as of January 2012, there are over 90 million users (Twitter has 100 million active users). To put this in perspective, they launched Google+ by invitation in June of 2011 and opened it up to the public in September of 2011. Google is positioning Google+ as their Facebook for B-to-B.

Google+ is a great content sharing platform, and building an audience on it may be one of the smartest things you do as a content marketer according to a recent post by Brian Clark on copyblogger, Why Google+ is an Inevitable Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy. Here are two highlights on why:

  • Google+ is a part of Google – they do a good job integrating with Google docs, Chrome, Google Reader, Gmail and YouTube.
  • Search – Google is the king of search and now they announced the Search, plus your world which merges personalized search with social search.

Brian also discusses concerns about Google having a stranglehold on the market and what we might expect moving forward.

The key for those of us who write content is to understand the language of our audience and make sure we reflect that in our content. Search will do the rest.

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Suggestions on How to Make Sense of Google+

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Suggestions on How to Make Sense of Google+

To listen to all the “experts” Google+ is the next best thing to come down the pike and will eventually replace Facebook in the B-to-B space. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but since they opened it up to the public a few weeks ago, there are over 50 million users and it’s growing everyday.

I have to believe that if Google is involved then it has a pretty good chance of succeeding. I’ve been on it and have started building my circles, but have yet to fully understand all the ways we can use it.

I recently read an excellent post by Debbie Hemley in Social Media Examiner, 20 Ways to Improve Your Google+ Knowledge that I thought was very helpful. She gives tips on how to get through the basics and highlights ways that you can use it in everyday B-to-B applications from setting up your circle to creating your profile, setting up notifications, plus much more.  Here are some highlights that I found interesting:

  • Engage and learn – go to Google+ tips on Twitter and see what others are saying and dive in.
  • Watch and learn – look at Google+ help and watch videos from people who created it.
  • Set up Google Sparks account– that way you can get the latest developments on what’s new.
  • Create a cheat sheet – to help you format and utilize hotkeys until you become more familiar.
  • Show off your Google profile – by putting it on your blog or website.
  • Go mobile – make sure you get the mobile app so you can use it from your phone. 

So I’d like to know if you’re on Google+ and if so, what are your thoughts?

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Are You Promoting Your Facebook Fan Page?

I must confess that when it comes to promoting our Facebook page, we don’t do a good job. I guess in my case for the targeted audience we’re going after, I don’t know if this is the most effective place to do it. LinkedIn, Twitter and even Google+ probably are better venues for us.

But for those of you who are focusing on building your fan page, I came across a great article by Justin Wise in a recent post on Social Media Examiner that highlighted 20 ways to spread the word on your Facebook fan page by educating your readers. Here are the ones that stood out to me:

  • Put the fan page URL in your email signature – imagine that with the number of emails you send on a daily basis what kind of potential reach you would have.
  • Ask others in your company to do the same – put it in their email signature.
  • Ask your Twitter followers to join your fan page.
  • Put a widget on you website and blog – don’t assume that people know you have a fan page.
  • Ask fans to post a link – if they are truly fans, they will post a link on their personal profile.
  • Put a tag on your YouTube videos – great idea and a way to get people more engaged.

What are you doing to promote your fan page?

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Google Plus and B-to-B Users – How To Get Started

Although Google Plus is still in its infancy, the social media world is investigating its uses and benefits. Currently, Google is only allowing personal profiles and it’s an invitation-only party. Right now at least.

I’ve asked Rachel Kerstetter from our PR Department to give our readers a basic review of what Google Plus is and how we can start using it.

Currently, Google is working on not only ironing out the wrinkles for the 10 million users that it attracted in the first two weeks, they are crafting entity profiles that will allow brands, companies, organizations and other non-individual users to jump in and start using Google Plus. The sign up period for business profiles ended on July 15th and a small group of businesses will be using the profiles so that Google can analyze how users interact differently with them than with other individual users.

What it is
For now, individual users are exploring the newest social networking experience. Google Plus features what I call hyper-personalization, allowing you to segment your connections in any way that you choose and sharing with select groups of people.

Benefits to your business
One Google Plus user pointed out that it could become useful as a business collaboration tool because of some of its included features. I’m going to hit a few of the Google Plus features that could benefit business communication. I’m sure that as the network grows, more useful features will be added.

  • Circles: Since you can personalize each circle with any way that you choose to label your group, you can share with industry-specific people easily. Imagine having circles called, “Industry Contacts” or “Business Partners” with which you control what you share, keeping personal and professional interest separated but still contained on the same network. And you can add one person to as many circles as you’d like. Once you get started on Google Plus, it is very easy to make new circles.
  • Hangouts: Business groups can chat and video chat through Google Plus to keep things all in one place while members are in different physical locations. Multi-user video chat is a pay-for feature on Skype so Google Plus could cut your video conferencing costs. Hangouts allow up to 10 users to video chat. Google Translate can be integrated into the Hangouts which makes international business easier and cheaper.
  • +1 Button: People can share items via the +1 button similarly to the various other social media buttons that you see elsewhere online. The Google Plus method of sharing is much more selective. The detailed method of separating people into circles could increase sharability (so to speak) of articles, posts and other information. People are much more likely to share industry-specific information on Google Plus because they can choose who sees it and not clutter their friends’ or family members’ newsfeeds with work-related postings.
  • Sparks: The Sparks menu is another hyper-personalized feature that Google Plus offers. This acts as one-stop shopping for topics of interest. You can browse topics (sparks) or add them to your menu for quicker browsing. This option sorts your news for you and allows you to go as specific in your interests as, “saw blades” or specific company names and as broad as “Construction” or “Buildings.” These sparks of information help individuals to keep an eye on what is happening around a certain topic, but it also helps get messages out to those who want to read them.

To select the content that shows up in the sparks feeds, Google Plus uses a combination of +1 sharing, normal Google Plus link sharing and Google’s search engine algorithms. The aim of the sparks material is to get fresh, new things into the feeds. One major parameter of sparks selection is the visual component, leading videos to frequently rank higher. If your business sells a product, consider uploading a video of the product in use to YouTube. There are still bugs in the system, but for companies engaging in SEO, sparks could eventually help increase visibility. Also, if you set your company’s name or your product name as a spark, you can use it to monitor your coverage. It is much like a Google Alert, except it doesn’t send you an email.

Other benefits related to Google Plus are:

Google Docs is a tool that lets you upload and share documents with anyone, anywhere. This lets you share even out of the office. This is not fully integrated with Google Plus yet, but has the potential.

Google is overall easy and free to use. One Google Account gives you access to a ton of Google products from Gmail, Google Voice and Google Plus to Google Translate, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Business pages. There are companies that encourage employees to open Gmail accounts so they can use Google chat to make work more efficient.

Wider professional access. Many workplaces block social networking sites to avoid the inefficient use of time by employees. Facebook may be blocked, but chances are Google is not. This means that your business contacts might have easier access to communication through Google Plus than they would with another social network.

Potential is the overwhelming benefit that Google Plus holds. The fact that Google Plus is new, added to Google’s financial capability and the existing Google products that are, or can be, integrated into Google Plus, gives this new social network enormous potential for growth and business usability.

Building your Google Plus
Once you’ve got a Google Account and a profile on Google Plus, you can start building your circles right away with your current Google contacts.

Since most businesses use Outlook for email organization, chances are that your business partners are not stored in your Gmail contacts so adding them to your circles would be a cumbersome process of looking for each individual process if you don’t export your contacts. (Google Plus provides a tool for you to import contacts from a Yahoo! or Hotmail.) If you have a Google Account and have set up your Google Plus, transferring your contacts from Outlook is much easier than searching for people or sending a bunch of invitations. Microsoft provides directions on how to transfer contacts here.

If you tend to conduct business communication through LinkedIn, rest assured that you can also import your LinkedIn connections in a similar method as Outlook. You can find out how here.

Once you’ve got all of your business contacts in Gmail, you can simply go to your Google Plus Circles page and click on the “Find and invite” option. From there you can drag each individual contact into your desired circle, or you can select multiple contacts at once by clicking and highlighting over the ones you want to add then drag them into your desired circle.

Prepare now
If you operate the social media for your business, I strongly recommend that you try to snag a personal invitation to join from a friend or colleague so that you can start becoming familiar with Google Plus. (If you don’t know anyone who can invite you to Google Plus, we might be able to help if you let us know in the comments.) Once you’re on, start thinking about how business can use it best when the entity profiles become available.

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Smartphone Users: What Are They Using Them For?

As the world grows more mobile, it’s inevitable that smartphones are and will become a more intricate part of our daily routine. It’s my contention that in our world of reaching the professional tradesmen these phones are being used on a regular basis.

I don’t have the data to back that up since there have been no formalized studies done specifically on this market segment. But if you make the assumption that what we do in our everyday lives rolls over to our work day routines, then a new study out by Google that looks at the purchasing habits of smartphone users in the U.S. may be of interest to you.

Chris Crum from Webpronews.com outlines the highlights of the study. Among them are these points that I find interesting:

  • 89% of smartphone owners use their device throughout the day for a variety of activities.
  • 82% notice ads on their phones and half of them take action.
  • 77% use them for search.
  • 95% of users have looked for local information
  • 77% have contacted a business by either calling or visiting

What kinds of trends are you seeing out there?

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