Google Plus is one of those social networking sites that didn’t have to build its audience from scratch. For example, like its main competitor Facebook had to. In this given case the prestige of the company was of great impact because in fact all those who had a gmail mailbox became full participants of the given social network. Google Plus marketing tips will be of use due to its novelty for any business because Google Plus is a relatively young social network. Also, it may be effective due to its large-scale participation and ability to hold thematic video meetings, make presentations and master classes. It is possible to develop your own promotional tactics in Google Plus for local business. And these possibilities allow young businesses to tell about their products and their businesses in general even at an early stage.
Theoretical part
Because of the novelty of the social network as opposed to its main competitors the most part of niches is not yet occupied in terms of topics. Though the massive involvement is demonstrational, Google Plus hasn’t yet grown to its competitors’ sizes. Taking into account the fact that Facebook more and more looks like an advertising platform this social network may eventually turn from a tool of communication into exchange tool.
Although it is supposed that the number of promotional posts will decrease, whereas now they clutter up the feed and this makes subscribers try hard to select interesting content, and that takes a lot of time. Administrators of those groups that give priority to their subscribers try to force an active part of users (those who do not just read, but also show activity on a page in the form of comments or “likes”) to unsubscribe. Passive users remain as subscribers, and so your page in the name of advertiser becomes less attractive.
There is a large number of similar groups in Facebook too. They are similar not only in subject, but also in content, as the content distributed in these social networks flows from one group / page to another. But this is the problem of the Internet in general when somebody’s ideas and articles are copied. Another thing is that this problem should not concern you if you are a brand, since you are already unique.
Below you will find those topics listed that are popular or will be popular within the bounds of this social network. But it’s not going to be a revelation, as the interests of people are quite standard and predictable and they do not depend on platforms because the audience is mostly similar all over the social networks.
The issue of promotion pages / groups on Google Plus is the lack of advertising mechanisms. It’s not about third-party services which allow buying or inflating the number of subscribers, as we are interested only in white-hat mechanisms, i.e. those mechanisms that allow building the audience in a natural way so that users would subscribe not because they are paid but because they really like your page and the content you provide.
Look at any of those groups that built their audience in an unnatural way. What do you see? Lots of participants but the lack of comments, likes and reposts, if only those activities were not inflated as well. The quantity doesn’t matter much. The main indicator you need to pay attention to is activity, but the activity should be natural. Proceeding from this fact we may conclude that it is quite difficult to get the subscribers that will meet your needs and the requirements of your business. There are no certain mechanisms to allow you targeting by specific interests, demographics, geography, age, and so on.
Let’s have a look at one of the pages in VK (Russian social network), that has more than one million of subscribers, or rather let’s examine the ratio of number of likes and reposts to the number of subscribers, and then will analyze Google Plus by the same parameters and will draw the conclusion. To maintain experimental integrity we have chosen the pages on the relatively close topic. Postee service was used to analyze the posts in VK.
The number of public subscribers in VK: 1 695 345
The number of a Google Plus page participants: 2720
We have analyzed the public in VK by means of Postee service and the most popular post has been determined – the post that gained 1600 likes and 870 reposts. Due to the absence of a special analyzing tool for posts in Google Plus we had to look through all the records manually, and the most popular post with 1078 “pluses”, 290 reposts and 258 comments has been chosen. One may see with the unaided eye the activity in Google Plus is greater than in VK. But if to go further and to match the number of likes to the number of participants it turns out that 39.6% of people took an active part on a page.
Google Plus Audience
The last quantitative indicator tells us that the number of registered users at the end of 2012 was more than 400 million. This means that among those 400 million registered users are also your potential and future clients. The share of English-speaking users in Google Plus is 52.8% (January 10, 2013 on a sample set of 97 million users), almost half of the users are people aged from 18 to 24 (45.6%), with number of male users outnumbering the female Google Plus users by 25%.
At that, it is necessary to remember the following:
The total number of user’s friends that are included into certain circles can not exceed five thousand people;
Each user may add not more than 50 members per day into circles or move this number of member between the circles;
The number of evaluations, “+1″ clicks and comments to a user’s posts influences the positions of account in Twitter associated with Google Plus account if there is such account. That is why one should carefully monitor the quality of the content that is placed in Google Plus;
With the assumption that advertising in its purest form is forbidden on the site according to Google Plus rules sometimes it is really difficult to distinguish advertising from recommendations of the material one liked. Abusing these rules may lead to ban.
What themes are popular in Google Plus?
1) Cooking. Everybody likes taking a meal, and not just to eat but to eat something tasty. That is why if your business is related to cooking, creating a page in Google Plus is a great option.
2) Pictures. If you are a photographer or if you run a photostudio, then you should definitely become a member of Google Plus because visual content in most cases gains the greatest number of pluses, reposts, and comments.
3) Humor. Who does not love laughing? Humor-based communities and pages have their active users and readers in Google Plus as well.
As a matter of fact, if the subject is popular in any of the social networks it will be most likely popular in Google Plus.
Practical part
The process of attracting new readers is quite trivial, but many simple things often lie on the surface while not many people see them or many people think they are too simple, and so may not be true. We will describe the actions that figured out to be effective in practice and which may be used to attract readers to your page. Each of existing social networks is different and has its own nuances and peculiarities of promotion, and Google is no exception. Rules are the same for all the social networks only in terms of content, because only interesting, engaging, and relevant to queries content will attract the audience to your page. Developers have come up with an interesting feature that motivates the owners of pages to post only the most interesting content. We will get back to this feature a bit later.
The mechanisms of attracting readers allow doing this without any cash investment. Sure thing, for obvious reasons it will not be too difficult for a major brand to attract new subscribers. The great part of the traffic is delivered to the site where such brand may place the links to accounts in social networking sites and thus gain subscribers. In case your brand is less known the mechanism of attacking the subscribers is developed otherways, and here we have two options:
1) If you have the budget you can go to a website where people are ready to become your subscribers for a certain monetary reward (the size of reward will only depend on the size of your budget). But this will not guarantee those people will actively participate on your page because the motivation in this given case is the money, but not the interest in a brand, and such subscribers may not know about you at all.
Google Plus pages
Such actions allow you to increase the quantitative indicator, but not the qualitative. If you fall back on such techniques then eventually you come to understanding that this doesn’t give you any results but work. There is a certain probability some of the subscribers attracted in such a way will start following you, but in most cases those are bots which do not show any activity.
2) The second method is slower than the first one, but you get a quality audience that will read your publications, comment on them, give you pluses and quote you. This option is quite trite and in combination with other approaches it may guarantee you good results. The subtlety is that you need to add the participants of social networks hoping for reciprocity. Of course acting in such a way doesn’t guarantee any activity on your page, but as experience shows attracting new subscribers in such a manner is more efficient. As for the particular page in Google Plus mentioned above – more than 900 people started reading it in less than three days and the number of participants grows with every passing day (the average growth per day is about 40-55 users). Therewith, if there are similar to yours pages in the subject you also need to add all the readers of these pages to your circles on Google Plus.
But you need to be patient and do your best. Do not expect that 5 thousand people added at a time to your circles will add you back to their circles, or that this will bring you instant results. The activity on your page will increase with the increase of the number of its subscribers. And this in its turn guarantees you not only the increase in pluses, but also the increase in the number of comments you need to keep an eye on in order to avoid your page turning into a newsboard. A positive moment is that there will no be spam as opposed to Facebook where the spam is a real concern.
Eventually, you will need to hire moderators who will monitor the page and keep an order on it, and also remove the comments of advertising character or to disable the option of comments at all. But the second option is less preferable because social networks are more about communicating but not about advertisement. Many owners of pages disable comments while subscribers are attracted not only by the content but also by possibility to leave the comments.
User categories
One of the primary mechanisms for attracting users to your page is selection, i.e. dividing users into categories. We may point out 5 of them:
Speakers;
Active audience;
Passive audience;
Not active audience;
Others.
Speakers belong to the circle of the highest priority – those are the users you need to focus on before everything else.
Speakers
Is the most active auditory in social networks. It became easier to track such users thanks to the latest Google Plus update. Now Google Plus provides you with the possibility to track the further spread of the published record. In order to see the pathway of distribution of the content you have published you need to click on a post bracket and then choose from the pop-menu “View ripples”. You will be taken then to a page where you’ll get a pie diagram remotely resembling a cluster of planets, the center of which is your record, and the arrows leading from you are those who have shared your post.
Google Plus Update: Watch How Posts Get Shared with Ripples
This shows how the record is distributed in Google Plus. Each circle is a person who has shared your post. The bigger is the circle the more users in their turn shared the post from a person who had shared it from your news feed. Those are speakers – users which will speak about you absolutely for free just because they like what you write. And those are exactly the users you need to add primarily. You may even create a separate circle to work further with them.
Below a circular diagram you may find even more interesting statistics. If you promote your personal page, then it is really worth going to each of the participants’ page who are in the circle and showing some activity on their pages to show you are not a bot, and that you are really interested in what they publish and write.
Active audience
The most effective way of adding each of the categories, except of the passive one, is going to the “What’s hot” section where you may see the records that gained lots of pluses and repost. It’s difficult to say if the number of comments influences positions and being highly ranked. According to some researches the post that received 30 pluses gets into that section and it can bee seen by those who read the feed of this section.
Active audience is the part of users who made one of the three actions with a record seen:
left a comment;
clicked +1;
reposted it.
In this given case speakers and active audience are alike in their actions but the speakers are still the most wanted group of users because they more willing distribute the content.
Passive audience
If the previous category is expected to be active on the assumption that users enjoyed the content you posted, then passive users most likely are not to be active. They will probably read you but such probability is quite unlikely. Although passive auditory include users who have accounts in social networks (while almost every user who has a gmail mailbox has the Google Plus account) they do not show any activity and do not even check their accounts.
Passive users may be active in a certain way but this kind if activity is very low and the circle of their communication is extremely small, as well as their posts are rare. You should add such users least of all. You need to remember the maximum number of users you can read is 5 thousand users. The number of such users cannot exceed the rest of the circles groups, even though that number is very large. You may add passive users with a hope for their future activity in Google Plus. At that, passive users may still read you.
Not active audience
Only lazy haven’t tried Google Plus when this social network appeared and this is not surprising because everything new is attractive and interesting due to new experience and communication possibilities, especially because this social network is the product of the popular company and that means the product is of high quality. We all remember when the rush started and everybody strived to try it.
After some time the rush ended: some users became active Google Plus users and some got tired of it when understood that this social network didn’t suit them due to different reasons, and so got back to Facebook where most of their friends had the social habit.
Others
By saying “Others” we mean those users who didn’t figure out why they would need Google Plus. Those people who have lost interest to it due to certain reasons. Those are users which do not add other users to their circles, do not write comments and do not publish posts. Why would you need to add them at all? The reason is very simple. It is quite possible that they will eventually change their mind and will become the active users. You may distinguish “Others” by absence of pictures, any data available and empty news feed.
Mutual “friends”
Almost in every social network there are those users who reciprocate anybody’s friend request and Google Plus is no exception. There is a “Share circle” option, so you can share your circle with everybody and those users who are interested in that circle will be able to add the participants of that circle. You may enter into a search bar such phrases as “mutual circles”, “share circle”, “will follow back”, etc. You are able to add users in bulk but you will need to filter them later by circles and that is quite time consuming practice. However, you can do the sorting:
By name;
By last name;
By relevance;
By most recent;
By circles;
By Google Plus presence.
But we are interested only in two points “By most recent” and “By Google Plus presence”. Sorting by presence in Google Plus is not quite clear because having looked through the first thirty users you may conclude there are users on the list who may be not active and that is not quite logical, as you may expect to see those who regularly publish posts, leave comments, etc. But it is quite possible there appear those people who periodically check their accounts to read the latest news from those whom they have added to their circles. If you do the sorting by most recent the first users in the list are those who often publish posts on their news feed, and these users can be treated as active audience.
“What’s hot” section
This section contains the posts that gained most of pluses and reposts. Posts of public people are doomed to getting into this section. Others have to make every effort to do this and that is a great motivation for publishing really interesting posts that will attract new readers and, consequently, increase the activity on your page. And if a user sees activity on your page he or she may consider your page as interesting and therefore become your subscriber.
Conclusion
The whole problem about this social network is that there are no internal or third-party tools for working with subscribers, analyzing their activities, and other information that may be of use for those companies who decided to set up Google Plus for business. The creation of advertising tools for target advertising that may attract new users is possible but the point is Google Plus is an experimental platform as of yet. It has funds to cover costs and to maintain this social network and that is why it is unlikely there will be any advertising tools available in Google Plus in the nearest future.
via
The post Working with Google Plus: how to attract subscribers appeared first on - Promodo Blog.