Marketing Your Business – Google+

– By Emma Dalzell

google +

One of the questions I always get asked by businesses looking to market themselves (often after they’ve asked what social media is!) is “What social media should I use?”

Of course, it depends on your business, what you’re looking to promote and where your target audience congregates, at least in the virtual online world anyway. So, here at Bare Bones Marketing, we thought it might be useful to give you a run down on the new(ish) types of social media, so you can see their pluses (pun intended!) and minuses for yourself.

Google+ is one of the social media channel (otherwise known as social networking) that businesses are increasingly asking about. Here’s the low down…

If you have been thinking ‘What is Google+? No one really uses it do they?” Then you would be wrong! Actually in the 2 years since its conception, Google+ has surpassed Twitter and LinkedIn  to become the #2 social network in the world next to Facebook. There are over 500 million Google+ users around the world, and that number is rising every day. Admittedly, the growth in usage does seem to be driven by our friends on the other side of the Atlantic, but like most things these days, we don’t tend to be far behind in our adoption of new online networking.

So what is Google+? Well the answer is a social network, but not like any of the others.

It is an open network where anyone can follow you, if your posts are ‘Public’, anyone can see them. But you can make them ‘Private’ too, which means you can select who within your ‘circles’ can see them. ‘Circles’ are simply groups of friends, acquaintances, business connections or anything you define. The great thing about this is that you can choose what you put in the wider online domain – just be careful to select the right circles!

Similar to all of the social media marketing channels you may be familiar with, you can share other people’s interesting and helpful information, which then can be shared and +1’d by everyone. And people can share your content too.  Similar to Facebook, you can share status updates, images, links to articles and more, and those updates can be shared, commented on, and +1’d (which is the Google+ equivalent of a ‘Like’). In fact, you could look at Google+ as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all rolled into one.

One of the most exciting things about Google+ is it is closely connected with Google Search – which receives over 90% of the world’s daily search traffic  – now THAT’s where you want to be! So it’s even more important to think about your ‘key words’ and how you want to be found on the search engines.

It may be that Google+ isn’t right for marketing your business – yet! But early(ish) adopters will reap some of the benefits such as through Google Authorship (more on that in another blog!).

Of course, you can follow Bare Bones Marketing on Google+ here and Emma Dalzell here – add us to your ‘circles’ – and let us know on any of our other social media channels… Twitter, Emma’s Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

 

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