Google+ is the latest social entity to hit small businesses to share their content on the web. This is a more developed social media platform then Facebook and Twitter which are more focused on the personal side of social media.
Google+ works by attracting users into your circles allowing them to view the content you share, very much the same as ‘likes’ and ‘friends’ on Facebook and the same as having followers on Twitter. The more users you have in your circles, the more people you will reach with your content which will increase the chances of your users sharing your content within their circles and so on.
Why Is Google+ Different from Facebook and Twitter?
Simple, Google controls what we search for! They are really forcing our hands in getting onboard with Google+ as they are favouring Google+ pages more than actual natural results. You can see this when you are logged into your Google account, not so much here in the UK yet but definitely in America, which means eventually it will get bigger across the globe.
When you search for a product or service you will see a new set of results with Google+ dominating the rankings above the natural listings and also the PPC listings. Google are really pushing this and forcing people to use their new social media platform as it gives priority rankings over all other types of listings.
You may have noticed the small ‘Plus’ box next to all the websites in your results pages. Again this is for promoting websites within your circles, telling Google what websites you think are important. The more +1′s added on each site, the higher the rankings will be, well for the time being anyway. At the moment, Google are bias about promoting their Google+ and providing top listing results for Google+ users and not always giving the best set of results as they usually do within their natural searches. Again this is going back to Google forcing our hand to create a Google+ account and share our content through their social media more than Twitter or Facebook as they will give your higher rankings. As this is all brand new and not a lot of users are using Google+, the results will not be as great but if Google keep with it and grow Google+ I’m sure they will be able to deliver more accurate results for searches, at the minute they are limited with the resources of users on Google+.
What Should I Do?
If you are sharing blog posts or content through Twitter or Facebook i would strongly recommend setting up a Google+ account straight away. Google really want to push this and are bias in the results toward Google+, so what Google wants – Google gets! Start sharing all your content and links through Google+ as well as Twitter and Facebook and let’s see if this takes off.
