How to get more followers on Google Plus?

1. Ask your Employees, partners and customers to add your business page in their circles and share it with their circles, they can do this when they plus one the page (which is the equivalent of the Like button in Facebook), or they can latter on Share the Page (you guessed it, the equivalent of Share button in Facebook).

2. Managers should spread the word about the page to their own circles, which can be easily done with the Spread the word button. Of course, assuming they have a large number of followers, otherwise this tactic won’t have significant results.

3. Invite your followers from other social accounts to follow you. The advantage of this tactic is that if they followed you on Twitter or Facebook for example, they will most probably follow you on Google+ as well. Additionally, it’s not very time-consuming. The possible disadvantage would appear if you share the same content on several social media channels, as sooner or later people following you in several of these channels will get annoyed by your repetitiveness. An interesting option you might want to consider to make your Google Plus page more visible is to introduce on your Facebook page a Google+ tab.

4. Add Google Plus pages connected to your industry in your circles. If you are very confident, you could follow even competitors, but I personally wouldn’t recommend it. It is important to mention that as a business page you can include pages in your circles, but you cannot add individual profiles to your circles, before they add you in their circles. So you cannot apply the Twitter strategy of Following many people and hope they follow you back.

5. After you added pages and people in your circles, be active. Comment, plus one posts and so on, even on your customers’ profiles! This is one of the new brand-follower interaction methods Google Plus brings to the table, thus making it possible for you (as the brand) to comment on a post that one of your individual followers posted on their own stream, or even share that post with your community. I hope you are as excited about this as I am J

6. Place the +1 button, or the link to your Google+ profile strategically on your website, blog, guest blog articles and other content you can technically control.

7. And last but not least, as in Twitter, add everyone to your Google Plus page’s circles, who has added your page in theirs.

What is the difference between plus ones and adding into circles?

Well, if you get a plus one, you can take it as a vote of confidence, but you have to remember that the person who pushed the +1 button will not get your stream updates, unless he/she adds you to their circles. So you can consider adding your page into a circle is a deeper commitment to your brand, than a +1. Keep in mind that people can take away their vote of confidence by pushing the +1 button a second time or by “kicking you out” of their circles.

Organizing Hangouts

Hangouts is the video chat and conferencing program, which can include up to 10 attendees. It’s been rolled out not so long ago for business pages as well. After pushing the “Start a hangout” button from the right, you will have to install a plugin, after which you will have to invite other people to your hangout.

Additionally, you have a feature called “hangouts with extras”, which besides the Screenshare option includes some Apps, from which in my opinion the most important at the moment are YouTube, Google Docs and SlideShare. So why not use Google Plus Hangout feature to provide customer service or to enhance the relationship with your clients?

How to manage my business page’s circles?

You can add a person or business into any number of circles (just select the circles tab in the menu and drag people into your circles), which makes possible a complex enough segmentation of your connections (compared to other social media channels at least), which is extremely beneficial. Of course, I can see that organizing your circles can be a tiresome process, not only if the number of your connections increases daily, but depending on your segmentation, it could be hard to maintain. But, think of all the benefits if you organize your connections on geographical considerations or the position they hold within their company – you could share content which is more specific for their interest.

To create a circle just drag and drop a person or business page in the first “circle”, after which you can edit, delete or share circles by clicking on the circle would like to make changes to.

How to do advertising on Google Plus?

At the moment you cannot advertise on Google+, like you can on Facebook, but with a little bit of imagination we could foresee a combination between Facebook ads and AdWords. Or maybe Google will take a different path, like no ads at all on its social platform. Why? Well, Josh Costine from Techcrunch has a pretty good point on how Google+ is made to better target ads on its other features and platforms.

Until then, you can use the +1 feature of G+ in your AdWord campaigns, if you link your business page to your AdWords campaign. This means that all your plus ones (gained by your page, website, ads and in the search results) will be summed up and the grand total will be shown, whether users are looking at your Google Plus page, you ad etc. The feature is called Social Extensions and its impact on CTR is still to be tested, but I guess it cannot hurt.

What other social marketing features would be nice?

Google Plus is a work in progress and hopefully Google will show the same openness for user demands as until now. I found the “user demands” in this Mashable post to be more or less pressing, although being written in November 2011 a few features like multiple managers and mobile have already been integrated into Google Plus.

I believe the most pressing is the analytics for Google Plus pages, which seemingly will be out in the next couple of weeks (but until then Google Analytics does a pretty good job in monitoring Google+ activity, without any additional code). Additionally, momentarily you do not have the option to set your own vanity URL, hopefully this feature will come out soon, although there is a less elegant option, about which you can read at this blog post about setting custom URLs for Google Plus Pages.

I already have a Facebook page, why should I take the time to create and manage a Google Plus page too?

You have to take into consideration the main difference between Facebook and Google+, which is that the latter, even though it has been around the web for less than one year, it is part of a conglomerate of other features and products, from which the most important is (obviously) Google Search. Mainly because it is not hard to foresee that Google will combine in one way or another its features and products, for an improved user experience. A first step in this direction was the launch of Search, Plus Your World, which personalizes your search results based on your Google Plus account. And many believe that it won’t stop here. So considering that Google Search maintains its global search market share of above 80%, if Google says get onto the Google+ wagon, your business gets onto that wagon.

Additionally, Google+ has other features that can help you to interact with your potential and actual customers. On the other hand paid advertisement is not yet available, as Google Plus pages are still in their infancy, but when they will be I am sure that the analytics behind them will be according to our expectations. Customized tabs aren’t yet available either, that I know of. And there are many features that we would be glad to see implemented on Google+, but I am sure that sooner or later Google will roll them out as well.

Now that you know the basics in Google+, go create your business page and start sharing content (and don’t worry if you mistype something in your posts, because you can edit it even after you posted it, avoiding so many embarrassing moments – unlike in Facebooks posts).

Hoping that you found this Google+ introductory guide useful for your business, we are looking forward to answer any questions you might have or to chat more on the subject in the comment section below or on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

At a first glimpse, Google Plus combines the advantages of Facebook pages with most of Twitter’s functionality.

How to create a Google Plus business page?

Categories

Choose the appropriate category, because you cannot change this latter (not yet anyway). There are several categories you can choose from:

Categories in Social Marketing Network Google Plus

1. Local Business or Place is the special category, as these type of pages are designed to help people locate the business using its physical address. So choose this if your business is a restaurant, pub, shop etc. in one particular city. The first step in this case is entering your location and primary phone number, in order to identify the location of your business.

2. Product or Brand – use this category if you want to separate your brands and products from each other. For example if you have a brand of women’s clothing and one for bowling equipment (being a little bit of absurd here, but you get the point) you might want separate pages.

3. Company, Institution, Organization – if the Google Plus page relates to a company or organization as a whole this would be the best choice.

4. Art, Entertainment, Sports – I would recommend this type of page for bands, artists, football clubs (obviously).

5. Other – If you feel that neither of the above is suitable for your page, you can choose this category, as it will not affect any feature regarding your page, every category having the same characteristics, except the local business one.

Big companies with multiple locations, or multiple brands or products, have the option of creating multiple pages for every location/ brand they own, apart from the company page for example.

After choosing your category you can enter you business page’s information, together with the subcategory within the category (in the example above: Consulting and Business Services) and the age for which the content is appropriate (and your address if you choose Local Business or Place).

Tagline and page photo

The Tagline is like the elevator pitch on Google+. It will appear below your page name on your page and as the description when somebody shares your page. If you don’t have inspiration right in the moment you’re creating your page, do not worry, you can edit it later.

You might wonder, where and how will the tagline appear to your potential or actual followers. Well, the tagline in Google Plus will appear in when people will share

your business page on their stream, in which even if it is longer than 10 words the whole text will be shown (and if it is very short it will look a little bit bare if you ask me).

Where the profile photo is concerned you can change it later as well, but do not forget to add one. It can be the logo of your company, your brand, or if you want something less mainstream put your creative hat on

How to edit your Google Plus page?

To edit the information of your business page just go to the Profile Tab and click Edit profile. You can change the name of your page, the tagline and the introductory information about your page, your contact info (email, phone and fax number, address, chat, pager). Additionally, you can change your profile photo and your cover photo. Make sure your profile photo has a high resolution and take into consideration that your cover photo has to be 940 x 180 pixels, but the last 1/3 of it is covered by your profile picture. Take advantage of the cover photo feature by illustrating your brand in an original way. If you already designed a cover photo for Facebook, you can try modifying that one and use it on Google+, as your brand is the same no matter what social channel you use.

To save the changes you have made press the “Done editing” button at the top.

I would like to mention a new little feature Google+ has, which enables you to see your page through the eyes of the “Public” or any other individual profile or business page. You can check it out by clicking on the “View as” button next to the “Edit profile” button.

How to manage your Google Plus page?

To act as your business page just select the page’s name from the list of your pages from the Manage your pages section, which you can find under the “Pages” tab or find the name of you page in the profile drop-down menu, in the upper-right corner.

OR       

To edit settings, as the email address you want to receive notifications on, the managers of the business page and other aspects select Page settings or Managers from the drop-down menu from the upper right corner or in the “Home” tab find the Settings option under the wheel icon.

OR       

This is it for now. In Part 2 on how to actively manage your Google+ business pages we will talk about getting more followers on Google+, managing circles and hangouts and other features available on this relatively new social network. Until then post your questions or comments in the comment section below or let’s chat on Facebook, Twitter and of course Google Plus

Google+ wants to make you “feel like you’re connected to a group of people, like you’re part of something”. That “something” wants to be much more narrow and personal than the “Friends” list from Facebook.

What’s your opinion? Will Google+ be a threat to Facebook?

Facebook matches advertisers to users based on users’ interests, activities, favorites, their job titles, as well as the names of the groups they belong to and the pages they are fans of. That’s a lot of information, and Facebook is still a place where more often than not people are willing to share an unbelievable wealth of personal stuff with their Friends and the Facebook Corporation. From a marketer’s perspective, Facebook can offer profound insights into the personalities and circumstances of one’s target audience. As a gathering place on the Internet, Facebook’s communities and the community demographics developed therein can give marketers surgical precision as they find an arena for their ads.

To begin his talk at SES Toronto, Marty Weintraub identified three classes of Facebook targeting tactics that every Facebook marketer ought to have at their disposal. Literal, competitive and inferred targeting should all inform a Facebook ad strategy. Let’s take a look at these three and summarize Weintraub’s discussion of them in more detail:

Literal Targeting:

These are the most obvious connections a marketer can make. Selling lacrosse sticks to people who like “playing lacrosse” on Facebook would be an obvious starting point. Literal targeting aims to match ads that are semantically related to the interests of users on Facebook. Often a keyword appears both in the interests listed by users and in the ad itself. Literal targeting allows marketers a way into Facebook that is parallel to SEM efforts on search engines. The downside is that these clear relationships sometimes don’t exist and that they unlock only a fraction of community demographics’ potential. As a marketer, Facebook allows you to go deeper into the lives your audience than ever before. The question according to Mr. Weintraub is “how deep are you willing to go?”

Competitive Targeting:

Competitive targeting focuses on both the positive and negative Facebook presence of a brand’s competitors on Facebook. A competing brand’s fans on Facebook might be an effective place to market your superior goods. Explain the added value of your product in your ad, offer a deal, try to win people over to your side. Fans of brands that are vulnerable, either because of an inferior product, negative press coverage, a recall of some sort, whatever the vulnerability may be, present fertile ground for converts. Essentially, marketers should try to find ways to leverage competitor investments in organizing their followers on Facebook both for their own Facebook presence and against the competitors themselves.

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No official word yet from Google

A couple weeks ago, Google’s Matt Cutts talked about a new iteration of Google’s Panda update, which he said was already approved and would be hitting soon. The update has been commonly referred to throughout the search industry as “Panda 2.2″.

This version is expected to more heavily address the issue of scraped content, an issue that continues to plague the web and Google’s search results (the scraped content often ranks higher than the original) even post-Panda. Cutts is quoted as saying in a liveblog of an SMX Advanced session, “A guy on my team [is] working on that issue. A change has been approved that should help with that issue. We’re continuing to iterate on Panda. The algorithm change originated in search quality, not the web spam team.”

Google has not made any announcements or references indicating that the update has gone live yet, but webmasters are thinking it might have been released. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld thread, where there is a mix of webmasters claiming they have suffered from the alleged update and some that have recovered. One said, “I’ve recovered as of 36 hours ago. Day1 of recovery, traffic doubled, adsense tripled Day2 of recovered, 4 hours in, traffic has doubled again, back to my best levels of 18 months ago.”

Cutts said he didn’t know when Panda would be launched internationally (in other languages), and that Google has made no manual exceptions with the update, meaning all sites have been affected solely by algorithmic tweaks – none by hand. ”

It’s important to note that Google makes algorithmic adjustments every day, and sometimes even more than once a day. Obviously not all updates get the attention the Panda update has received, but you never know when some adjustment can impact your site’s rankings for better or for worse.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Strong creative can be a huge competitive advantage in the world of paid search. When you can pay less to get more, you’re doing something right.

The compounding factors of improved CTR, increased quality score, and reduced CPC can make a tremendous impact on performance. Ad copy testing lies at the heart of seizing this competitive advantage.

With an endless number of attributes to test, it can be a little daunting to pick a starting point. Looking for a positive impact? Here are five ad copy attributes you can test.

1. Price Points & Percentage Off

If you’re a retailer, this is must. You’re missing out big if you aren’t testing into specific price points and percent off offers.

Important: don’t make assumptions here. Test out multiple price points and percentages off to find out what will resonate with consumers. Here’s one of my favorite illustrations of why not to assume anything when it comes to price points:

PPC Price Points

A 76.5 percent CTR lift on the higher price point. We can make assumptions as to why the higher of the two price points experienced the higher CTR. Maybe the “or Less” factored in, or maybe “$39” just sounded too good to be true. Hard to say. This is precisely why we test.

2. Google Sitelinks

By now you have hopefully enjoyed the benefits of running Google Sitelinks in your ads. The presence of ad sitelinks can lift CTR by more than 30 percent.

Surprisingly, many advertisers still haven’t added these to their campaigns. Maybe they’ve tested it and found that their ads perform better without sitelinks, but this is doubtful. I haven’t seen an instance where an ad’s CTR decreased as a result of having sitelinks present.

Don’t let your sitelinks get stale. Remember to rotate in new pages to test, and test variations of the ad copy. Keep refining.

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Social media ROI has remained elusive for numerous marketers despite their best efforts to develop a calculation that will prove the business value of the allotted social media resources.

Through a new feature in Google Analytics, some customization to your Google Analytics tracking, and diligent work on the part of your social media team, the ROI of your social media efforts can be discovered using Google Analytics. To get to the point where you can calculate social media ROI, there are four steps that need to be taken.

Step 1: Implement Proper Social Media Tracking

Ensure that you’ll have the ability to segment revenue that’s generated through social sources by your internal direct efforts and revenue that resulted through external social means. In other words, revenue that’s generated as a result of links your team placed on social sites and revenue generated through links placed by people outside your company.

In order to measure your direct impact, you need to ensure you’re always using campaign tracking on any links you put out on social media sites that point back to one of your sites. It’s a fairly easy process, but one that can be a bit tedious to manage at the outset. Once you’re in the habit of always adding campaign tracking, it will become second nature and the results will be well worth the effort.

Google offers a simple URL builder tool to help create campaign tracking strings, but you should either build your own tool or creating one in Excel that allows you to manage the names that are used for each parameter. This is very important because you don’t want to cause yourself reporting headaches by using different names for parameters that should be the same.

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It’s been our experience that asking for a testimonial can be a long and arduous process. Sometimes it seems easier to just ask a friend to repeat after you, or invent a statement that touches on all your key selling features.

The value of a real testimonial can’t be stressed enough in our opinion.

Sometimes getting one is really difficult. I’ve been asked to write testimonials for people I’ve worked with and it’s hard! Instead, we’ve found writing down a client’s comments after a positive discussion and then sending it to them asking for their approval to use their statements to be the most effective.

When someone else basically writes it for me after speaking with me, it’s easy to just reply “approved!” It is in my own words, and expresses what I wanted to say as part of a conversation rather then having fight writers block.

In terms of fake or testimonials written from friends, we always suggest avoiding them. Sometimes potential clients will want to speak to the person who provided such a rave review. If you have a good relationship with your clients, they’re often willing to network with others who are also interested in using your services.

What could be a better sales tool than that?

In link building, getting shot down is just part of the game. We know that going in, but we also try to find ways to hedge our bets. Hence, mass emailing and link exchange spam. The broader the net you cast, the better your chances of catching something, right?

That kind of theory does help explain the lack of personalized emails. Rejection is one thing, but the painstaking nature of sending link requests one at a time and getting nowhere is beyond frustrating.

We can deal with getting called names, like “dirty spammer” or having insults hurled at our sites, our profession and/or our mothers. We can even laugh at it and hang some of the best ones up on our office walls.

But silence is painful. When it seems like all of our emails are just being sent into a response-less void, it’s actually more disheartening than being told to “die a miserable spam-filled death.”

High rejection levels and unanswered emails are two of the biggest deterrents for many people who’ve attempted and abandoned this tactic. But sending personalized, well-constructed, compelling link requests can be a highly useful method of building links. That is, if you nail the finer points.

Creating a successful link request is about more than just using someone’s name because you found it on the “About” page. And if “nos” and silence are all you’re getting back, then most likely, it’s not them, it’s you. Here are only a few reasons why even personalized link requests may be declined.

It Never Got Opened

In all likelihood your email got dismissed without ever being opened. With a poor subject line or an email address that triggered a spam filter, your message may never have passed in front of human eyes.

What you put into your subject line matters. A lot.

There are some really dumb red-flag words you can use (e.g., “link exchange”) but it’s possible it’s also just too generic, or vague. Even seemingly innocuous attempts like “Hey There” or a smiley emoticon are kind of sketchy.

Some websites tell you what to put in a subject line so they will know you’re human. But if it’s not that obvious, try responding directly to the title of a specific page, topic, or article. Of course that’s impossible if you’re just sending a mass email from an automated program. And that’s really just comedy for the rest of us anyway, so bully for you.

A Total Lack of Relevance

The biggest reason any link request will be turned down is that it’s just not appealing to your target. Suppose the email does get opened, and the recipient even decides to visit the site in question, what exactly are they going to find? Will they discover that it is, as you claim, “relevant” to their page? Is it really something of interest, value and relevance? If it isn’t, then you pretty much wasted your time and theirs. Drawing cogent connections is probably the most important part of sending a personalized link request.

Obviously the best matches are directly relevant to your site’s overall topic. But most of the time you’ll have to do a little digging and angling to make a convincing correlation.

The best bet is to provide information or resources that support their existing content. Even suggesting new content that will bring value to their readers is a solid approach.

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Developing linkable content for a site has always been a great way to develop links. Instead of the typical written content I’m talking about anything online that people can link to – tools, widgets, cartoons, surveys, statistics, charts, interactive games, etc.The trick is finding the content that will attract links after you’ve actively promoted it. Let’s explore methods of coming up with a strategy for your site, or client.

Proven Techniques

The simplest way to ensure your content will attract links is to find something already accomplishing the task. Spend time researching sites in your industry and related businesses. When examining their backlinks, make a note of what type of content is getting the good links. Then do something similar – with your own spin.

You’ll notice in most cases the content with great backlinks wasn’t created for the purpose of link development.

Here’s a tip. If the content page has a higher PR (PageRank) than the homepage you’ve probably found a truly remarkable strategy. Regular readers know I rarely mention that little green bar so many are addicted too. Yet, in this instance, it can help you identity a successful strategy.

Be the First

Always be on the lookout for new trends or problems facing your industry. If you’re the first to create something around this you’re more likely to get the links. This could be an app, online tool, widget, research, or even a cartoon poking fun of the new trend.

If you’re a small company, don’t be overwhelmed by the lack of resources. Keep in mind there are a wealth of talented independent contractors who can help you. This could range from a talented programmer to a creative cartoonist. Keep your options open.

Modernize an Online Tool

Is there an old online tools that is useful yet hasn’t been updated with a modern feel in five or 10 years? Would it make a great smartphone app? This is your chance to update and improve it at the same time.

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