Google+ Tips for Your Business

Since its launch last year, Google+ has garnered over 100 million users. If you’re not on Google+, you could be missing prime opportunities to reach current and prospective customers or to boost employee engagement. To get started, check out this short, fun video tutorial from Rackspace and these 10 tips to build user engagement:

1. The Tagline and Introduction fields of your About page are indexed in Google search results so use your keywords. The Tagline is like a description meta tag on a website. Limit the field to ten, keyword-rich words. Lengthier taglines could get truncated. The Introduction field is basically a summary section to give an overview of your company, promote your products, or share your mission statement.
2. You have a Cover photo and a Profile photo for your page. Use your logo, headshot, or other business-related image for your Profile photo. Recommended size is 260px x 260px. Maintain this field as a consistent branding element. The Cover photo, larger at 940px x 180px, is where you can get creative and display an image that reflects your brand personality. Save those shots of the team outing at the miniature golf course to post to your stream.
3. You can get up to three times as many followers with a Plus button on your website. Get the code to create your +1 button here. Also, share your Google+ page in your personal circle, in your email signature, and on other social networks. The more Pluses you get, the more authority your page has and the more users you’ll attract.
4. Share relevant content. Think about the type of content your customers would be interested in reading and motivated to share. The more +1s and shares your content gets, the more credibility your content and your business garner.
5. The things you +1 from your business page are also reflected in your stream so be sure you’re “pulsing” content that reflects your business. You can +1 the pictures of your parents’ anniversary party on your personal Google+ page and keep your business page focused on showcasing your company’s blog posts, third-party commentary, customer stories, and other business-related content.
6. Use Circles as a siloed social network where you can create customized sharing groups. For example, your engineering team can have its own circle to distribute relevant team content, your support team can have its own circle to interact with customers, and you can create circles to segment communications to customers by geographic location or other pre-determined factors.
7. A Hangout is like an online video chat room. Businesses are using Hangouts to create richer support experiences, to facilitate video conferences between locations, and to broadcast presentations or events. You can even record and upload the live video stream to YouTube and share with a wider audience.
8. Stick to visually engaging updates. Google+ updates with a photo get more pluses than text updates and videos get even more pluses than photos. Repurpose images and videos from your blog or other internal or external sources to keep eyes, and pluses, coming to your page.
9. Tag updates using the #. For example, a recent post about OpenCloud uses the #opencloud to direct users to more OpenCloud content. You can add as many tags as you’d like but limit to 3-4 tags so you don’t look spammy.  You can also tag other users by using the + sign, for example +JohnDoe. That tag shows up on John Doe’s page and is visible to his followers and your followers.
10. Post regularly but don’t over post. Under posting reduces your opportunities to engage with your audience. Having no Google+ presence is akin to have a Google+ page that hasn’t been updated in months. On the other hand, over posting can cause your followers to ignore your volumes of updates or worse de-plus, or unfollow, you.

Now all that’s left to do is go share something and wait for the pluses to roll in.