Maximize Your Social: A One-Stop Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy for Marketing and Business Success

Chapter 10

Maximizing Your Google+ Presence

Most people reading this book probably aren’t surprised that I had a dedicated chapter to blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But a chapter dedicated to Google+? Maximizing your social is all about optimizing your presence on all the social media platforms, and at this point, Google+ has already become a major social networking platform that once again transcends both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) industries.

Google is integrating Google+ with many other products, which brings many people into the Google+ fold. As a result, as I mentioned in Chapter 5, recent statistics indicated that Google+ was the second most active social network in the United States. This is proof that Google+ deserves your attention, and after reading this chapter and the special report on how Google+ is changing the online world, hopefully you’ll better understand why having a presence on Google+ should be an integral part of your social media strategy.

SEARCH, PLUS YOUR WORLD

Google made its most significant change to its algorithm when it introduced Search, plus Your World in 2012.1 If you’re not familiar with this, it basically provides personalized search results for Google+ members when they do a Google search. For example, if those you have circled (similar to liking a person on Facebook or following someone on Twitter) have +1’ed a page or post of yours (or liked, in Facebook terms), their actions are now influencing the ...