At first glance, it’d be easy to mistake Google+ as just another social media platform – and not the most successful one either, when compared to the likes of Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. But to stop at that first glance is to do the platform – and your marketing efforts – a disservice. In actuality, G+ is one of the fastest growing social networking sites out there, especially as it becomes a go-to source for social logins throughout the web.
Still, as Demian Farnworth argues so poignantly in this recent article, Google+ for marketers is more about Google and its search algorithms than anything else. The proof is in the site’s Search + Your World (S+YW) feature, which draws from G+ users’ friends, own posts and photos to create customized search results. Marketers who have taken the time to grow their G+ following are far more likely to rise high in the search results of users who have added them to their circles. Yes, G+ is a social network, but it’s also more of a social layer in the search process, one that’s designed to turn up more relevant results that increase click-through rates, conversion and engagement. If all of that isn’t an incentive to get your marketing efforts onto G+, I don’t know what is.
As you’ve probably inferred, the larger your following is on G+, the better you’ll fare. If you’ve done this before on other sites, there are many lessons to apply here, but you’ll also want to familiarize yourself with the unique tools and approaches G+ has to offer. We suggest starting with a good Google+ guide as a primer, as well as these top 5 tips below.
1) Actively Curate a Targeted Audience
It’s clear that growing your audience on G+ is essential for ranking higher in more search results, but where to start? Again, relevancy and proactivity are key. You can’t just slap up a few posts here and there and hope they’ll be found.
Instead, start by defining your target audience. Who do you really want to reach? What are their demographics? What kind of topics will they be interested in? If you don’t know this already, follow a few of your competitors to see which of their posts get the most engagement. Additionally, enter keyword hashtags into the search bar to see what people are saying about your industry, keeping a sharp eye out for discussions in the comments and questions you could possibly answer.
Once you’ve got a good idea of the content your target audience is looking to consume, start reaching out to people in comment threads, or who’ve put certain keywords in their profiles. For key influencers in the industry, comment on their articles frequently, or reach out to them to propose a guest post so you can expose your brand to their audience. For more everyday followers, engage with their posts (in the most non-creepy way possible) and consider running contests to get them on board (i.e. a follow will gain entry into the contest).
As you grow your G+ following, it’s also important to ensure that your followers on other social media platforms know how to link to your G+ presence. Add your G+ page link to your website, your bio on other sites, and do the same for those sites on your G+ “about” page as well. As you launch, it’s totally fair game to promote your new page directly on other social sites via posts. Adding +1 buttons to blog posts on other sites will make it much easier for followers to engage with your G+ presence, as will directly connecting your page.
In short: the greatest benefits of G+ come when you’ve got an actively engaged and wide following. To get that, you’re going to have to do a little ground work.
2) Generate Ideas and Target Posts Using Circles
If building and keeping your following means having hyper-relevant content, um…how do you get that content, and, more importantly, how do you get it to the right place? The answer, my friend, is a little thing called Circles.
Circles, in my opinion, is one of the best features of G+. This is what allows you to categorize your followers, so you can give each kind of follower only the content you know they’ll be interested in. A clothing company, for example, might have one circle for female customers within a certain age range, and another for male customers within a different age range. When it’s time to promote certain sales or to post an expert article on hacking your wardrobe, the clothing company can then easily send the right posts in the right direction.
But more than just that, circles can also help you generate ideas for content in the first place. Looking to see what’s on those female customers’ minds? Just drop into that circle and take a look at the kinds of discussions they’re having. Chances are, you’ll find a question you can answer, and that could lead to a whole new content campaign – with an audience standing by to consume what you produce.
3) Keep on Top of What’s Hot
Another easy way to stay on top of what’s relevant is to make use of the “What’s Hot” button on the G+ dropdown menu. Here you can see which topics are trending, and then jump on board with relevant content to play on that theme. That could mean an entire post specifically on that topic, or it could mean tweaking something more generic you had waiting in the content warehouse to fit the topic of the day. That old post about “Top Tips for Using Facebook for Your Business” could become “What the Golden Globes’ Facebook Page Can Teach Us About Content Marketing.” See what I mean?
This strategy is of course best done when you take advantage of a wide variety of content formats. G+ is a particularly visual medium, much more akin to Pinterest in look than to a blog. So photos and videos do especially well (videos are a particularly good strategy, as Google-owned YouTube is the world’s second largest search platform, which makes for some excellent SEO mojo when combined with G+).
4) Claim Authorship
One of the biggest benefits of using G+ is that Google indexes those posts immediately. That’s great for rising in search results, but you’ll want to make sure you’re just as quickly claiming authorship to increase your post’s credibility and social impact. Authorship will make your posts feel personal, adding a profile photo and byline next to your content in search results. With your trusted name featured front and center, searchers will be far more likely to click on your work. If you publish regularly on the same domain, it’s easy to set up authorship by entering your Gmail address here. Otherwise you’ll have to use the rel = “author” tag for all of your posts, for which we recommend this detailed guide.
5) Use Hangouts, Hashtags and Mentions to Spark Engagement
Of course, the more you can engage your G+ followers, the more likely they’ll be to share your content, become paying customers and spread the word about your brand. G+ makes engagement particularly easy with its Hangouts feature, which is what Skype would be if it was fun and actually worked more than 50% of the time. With Hangouts, you can meet with 10 to 15 of your followers at a time, doing everything from discussing how-to tips to showing off recipes to doing wine tastings or just debating controversial issues within your industry – whatever works. Hangouts comes with a number of fun games and on-screen animations to spice things up, and they also link directly with Google Drive, so you can easily make presentations right in-screen. For bigger audiences, Hangouts on Air streams directly to YouTube and is automatically archived, meaning your Hangout will do double duty as video marketing content later on.
Whether in Hangout descriptions or other posts, another great way to generate engagement is through search hashtags as described above or by mentioning followers directly so they’re aware of the post and invited to comment. This is a very simple strategy, but it gives your calls-to-action much more oomph as they become direct rather than general calls.
The Takeaway
Google+ has so much to offer marketers, it’s kind of ridiculous. Taking the time to master the platform will have big payoffs, both in terms of search and in terms of community building and engagement.
What has your experience on Google+ been like so far? Let us know in the comments below.
via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/5-content-marketing-tips-google-0751426?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=5-content-marketing-tips-google
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