So many businesses have Google+ accounts that they barely use, or that they use in the same way they use Facebook or Twitter. There has been a lot of confusion about the best way to use G+, and so a lot of businesses have failed to develop their G+ marketing strategy to the fullest. If you’re looking to get more out of the G+ marketing experience, here are a few tips to boost you up to the next level.
1. Know the shortcuts. Unlike on Facebook, G+ allows you to use little shortcuts to format your text. If you put asterisks around text, for example, it will appear in bold; if you put underscores around text, it will appear in italics. Just having text that stands out from everything else can help – after all, a user’s G+ stream can go by very quickly, so you want your text to reach out and grab them both with quality content and with interesting (yet reasonable) formatting.
2. Get social. It may seem like G+, more than other social networks, is about pushing out a message rather than interacting, but there are ways to start engaging not only with your audience, but with those whose attention you want to get. Using a + sign before someone’s name accomplishes the same thing as the @ sign does on Twitter – it alerts them to the fact that they’ve been mentioned, and encourages them either to interact with you, or, even better, to share your content with their own followers.
3. Use hashtags. You may think of hashtags as a Twitter-only thing, but G+ has really knocked the hashtag concept out of the park. When you use a hashtag on G+, Google automatically includes it in the search results when someone searches for that term on G+. If you keep up with trending topics, you can start to use hashtags to associate your posts with topics that are popular at the moment.
4. Show rather than tell. Right from day one, the photography community latched onto G+, and image sharing has become one of the most popular and frequently-used features on the network. This has carried over across all interests, so if you want to hang with the popular kids on G+, you need to start sharing images. This goes hand in hand with your blog strategy – creating great images for your blog posts will then carry over as you share those posts with your G+ network.
