Building brand awareness for business, for people and for a combination of both is extremely efficient with all of the easy to use features within Google+. If you are familiar with using other social media platforms for marketing like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, then Google+ will be a breeze.
Practical tips for using Google +
Once you have setup a personal Google+ page and a business Google+ page, the first thing to do is get active. Activity generates interest and you can get active using Google+ straight away by repurposing existing video content, images, website creative (by linking to it) and more.
You can also chat about an event and complete any/all the above basic activities from here:
Find friends on Google+ and build followers
You can import contacts from your Hotmail account, your gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn and also import data from CSV files so there’s no excuse not to have lots of friends very quickly. This means that you can have some pretty tailored circles in place in a really short time-frame. Typical circle segmentation might be:
- Family
- Friends
- Workmates
- Acquaintances
- School friends
- Peers
- Marketing
- Education
- Outreach
- Much more…
Make yourself an author and see yourself in the SERPs
It still surprises me the number of people that write blogs on a regular basis but have not yet linked those blogs to their Google+ profile to get the authorship value from the blog content. For me it’s great to see your blogs appear in the SERPs and more importantly get some relevant traffic to your site or your company website because your content has greater perceived value being linked to you as an online author.
Yes that’s me hanging from a tree above the Guardian blog and popping up in 4th in Google too, discussing maximising brand awareness with social media marketing:
Your profile is your chance to shine so don’t leave it incomplete
It’s easy to update most profile elements by clicking edit on the element when logged in. You should also go to profile and then select settings and look at the Google+ settings for areas like:
- Who can interact with you and your posts
- Profile settings and syndication
Other areas that you will want to setup include:
- Other profiles
- Contributor to
- Links
As well as keeping the basic details up to date for:
- Occupation
- Contact Information
- More
Start reaching more people
Find people you have not yet connected to. There is an inbuilt ‘Find People’ feature that allows you to add friends of friends to your circles so approaching people in this way who have interests in similar areas is a great start.
You will want to tie Google+ in with your other marketing communications; email, website and more so that people can easily find your G+ account and add you to their circles.
Use the Google+ search facility (in the same way that you would on Twitter to find people to follow) and identify thought leaders, key industry influencers and relevant parties to add to your circles. Comment on relevant newsworthy Google+ updates and naturally pick up followers.