Some businesses and marketing teams unfairly treat Google+ like a social media content dump; nothing more than a bulletin board to publish content that was originally meant for other social networks in an attempt to increase their SEO efforts.
It’s all too common for marketers to only focus on publishing content that has been repurposed from other networks or blogs and fail to actively participate in the Google+ community. Many of these brands can miss the features that make Google+ a unique opportunity to share content and as a result, can struggle to develop any real traction with their content.
While repurposing content can yield many advantages, it shouldn’t be the sole purpose of any social network strategy since each channel requires unique content to nurture their audiences. Marketers should test a variety of content types on Google+ to incorporate a healthy mix of themes your organization regularly addresses.
Google+ benefits from a thriving and dedicated community that often consumes content varying from visually appealing posts such as videos, GIFS and infographics to in-depth discussions that we’ve grown to expect from chat rooms or fan forums. Many Google+ users interact by offering advice and openly sharing their expertise within circles to give back to their communities. The overall mindset is that Google+ users are looking to learn and communicate with their content and self promotion doesn’t tend to resonate as well.
To create content that caters to the wants and needs of your audience, you should begin by developing a healthy understanding of how your community wants to interact with your content and what your audience is looking to accomplish while using Google+.
Understand Your Google+ Demographic by Actively Participating in Communities
The Google+ demographic largely skews towards males in their late twenties and early thirties, which equates to more than 70% of the community, and they tend to be “techies”. Active Google+ users are likely to be software engineers, designers, IT professionals, writers, marketers and photographers with an above average education. Brands should create content that appeals to the wants and needs of this audience in a genuine and non-promotional way.
Start by becoming a member of several Google+ communities with a large amount of active users that are relevant to your industry, product or service offerings. These communities can allow for your business to collaborate with your target market, share ideas and ask questions to people who have similar or shared interests.
Communities are similar to focus groups for your business and many already have thousands of members that you can begin interacting with. By engaging with these audiences, you can learn what content performs the most effectively and when it’s best appropriate to suggest a blog post, article or other content from your website.
Participate with content and information that is shared by other members in your communities and add your own perspective or expertise. Through this discussion, you can learn hot to create content that is best suited for your audience and build content strategy to leverage your campaigns and initiatives moving forward.
For example, if a brand is marketing photography equipment and notices that YouTube video tutorials and product reviews for camera gear are published and actively shared within their community, it may be an indication that video content serves their audience best. This doesn’t mean that only video content will be effective, but it can help give you an idea on where to start.
Experiment With Google+’s Unique Feature Sets
Finding the best content types for any given network is often discovered through continuous testing and careful attention to the performance of your content. Google+ is no different from that aspect, but if you need a place to start, you should experiment with content that has worked on your other social channels and tweak it to match what you learn along the way.
Share visual content such as videos and photos as you would on other networks but also consider using features that are unique to Google+, such as posting animated GIF content. GIFs are quick and sometimes humorous clips that can be used to draw the attention of your audience and are useful when solidifying a point within your content.
When you publish visual content, include a few written paragraphs and use the Google+ formatting options to help your content stand out. Vary the text in posts by bolding headlines, adding italics and incorporating bulleted lists when applicable. These techniques can help break up text clumping from your posts and help make your content easier to ready, especially when publishing lengthy content.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, content shared on Google+ often does better with more copy included in your posts. To take advantage of this, use your Google+ stream as another avenue for distributing your long form content such as blog posts or white papers.
Write a mini blog or a summary that highlights the key purposes of your content and include a link back to your website. Yes, this is content repurposing, but the focus should be on using the unique features of Google+ to cater these posts specifically to your audience and concurrently help boost your SEO.
To further explore the capabilities of Google +, engage your audience by holding live Google Hangouts. Hangouts are limited to ten people, but you can best use this feature by inviting industry influencers to have conversations or conference about topics that interest your audiences. This open discussion content can help you better connect with your customers. Try holding Hangouts that focus around Q&A’s, product tutorials and thought leadership discussions.
By using a variety of the features that are unique to the Google+ network, your business can learn to create content that is suited for your audience and better represents your products and services.
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