Google+ Social Media Marketing Tips
Posted by Sallie Burnett
How to Use Google Plus for Business
Are looking for ideas on how to use Google Plus, or incorporate Google Plus into your company’s marketing strategy? We have compiled the top tips to use Google Plus for content marketing, engaging fans, driving website traffic, building your brand and more.
- Leverage About Menu —Your page’s “story” under the About menu becomes your meta description when your page shows up in search results. Craft the introduction to your business to inform and entices more clickthroughs. In addition, Google+ page gives you the opportunity to add links that are important to your business in the “Links” section under the About menu. Along with your website, include your blog, social profiles, and any page you want to drive traffic to.
- Keep it Fresh — Create a content calendar and schedule your posts. Post at least once a day, seven days a week. Three tweets per day seems optimal on Google Plus. Post consistently, some users have experienced drops in traffic up to 50% when posting less than normal.
- Be Engaging — Content that gets attention usually includes questions, calls to action, photos or videos, or thought-provoking comments. Try to limit directly promotional posts about your business to 10 – 20 percent of what you post.
- Customize Profile Image and Cover Photo — Both should capture the culture and essence of your brand. Update your cover image regularly — it makes that all-important first impression and can be used to showcase key messages and products, as well as branding.
- Interact — The more you interact on Google Plus, the faster you build connections and increase your audience. In addition to posting your own content, share and comment on others’ posts (you’ll see them in your Stream). You can also add a + before someone’s name to highlight a certain circle member, social influencer or company member in your post. Remember that they will receive notification, especially if you send it within a circle you have included them in.
- Create Collections — Collections are like interactive magazines which not only feature content but also facilitate conversations with people passionate about a subject. Google+ Collections allows you to categorize your updates by topic, which helps your followers quickly find updates for the topics they’re interested in. Previous posts can be moved into new collections you have created by clicking the arrow to the right of the share icon.
- It’s Crucial to Ask Customers to Circle You — Being in more people’s circles, or having more Google+ followers, improves your position on regular Google searches. Once users add your page to their circles, you can add them to yours.
- Optimize Your Page for SEO — Use keywords as you fill out the Introduction in your Google+ page’s About section as well in your post. Use keywords that you want to rank high on, and those keywords your customers are using.
- Join Google+ Communities — Google+ Communities are places where users can share specific questions, comments or content relating to a particular topic with other users who are just as interested in the conversation. Communities can be a great avenue for reaching your target audience and engaging them in a relevant conversation.
- Add the +1 Button to Your Website – When Google Plus users click the button, it’s shared with their circles. In addition to putting the link in your email footer and on all of your social media pages, you can add a badge to your site.
- Post Links Directly in Google+ — In the Google Plus newsfeed, linked images are shown with a very small photo and a link description. If you want your content to stand out, don’t use a scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Spreadfast for all your status updates. Instead, go to your Google Plus account and upload an image, add your description and then put the link in your description.
- Optimize Your Posts — The first 45-50 characters of your Google+ status update becomes that post’s page title in Google’s search results, so craft that first line as if you’re writing a blog post title, and include a keyword you’re trying to rank for and your audience is searching for.
- Link Your Google+ Page to Your Website — Link your Google+ page to your website to not only create an inbound link from Google+, but to allow your Google+ page to appear on the right-hand side of search results.
- Use Images — Visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. Visual assets (photos, video, illustrations, and infographics) are one of the core tools you have to tell your brand story.
- Leverage Analytics — with Google+ Platform Insights you can see how users are interacting with posts, including views, clicks, and CTR (Click-Through Rate). This can help you optimize interactive posts to gain the greatest engagement.Use tools like Steady Demand to look at peak times to post to get the best engagement, mentions, hashtags, key influencers and more.
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Customer Loyalty Consultant Global Keynote Speaker | Social Media Marketing Strategist at Customer Insight Group
Sallie Burnett is the founder and CEO of Customer Insight Group. This strategic marketing firm leads the way in the evolution of how companies engage their customers and earn their long-term loyalty.
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Filed under: Online Marketing