Google + for Beginners and Pros
I have split this blog post into two halves. Part 1 is Google+ for Beginners if you are new and part 2 is Google+ for power users.
Part 1 – Google + for beginners
Google+ is Google’s new social networking site. Imagine an amalgamation of Facebook, Twitter and blogging sites but with the ability to send updates to pre-specified groups (circles)
The best way to visualise the way it works are with these three scenarios:
1) Post to 1 circle = Twitter (each circle can be considered as a Twitter account)
2) Post to multiple circles = Facebook
3) Post to public = Your blog
There are a couple of little buggy annoyances but I am sure over time these will be sorted out. If you haven’t got an invite, just drop me an email and we can sort you out with one, they are widely available now and not the gold dust that they were.
I personally don’t think it is a Facebook killer, but I think it may have ramifications for Twitter and maybe even for blogging sites. The main annoyance it is another channel that needs to be monitored and managed and as yet the public facing API has not been released but I am sure that when it is, TweetDeck and Seesmic will be on top of it very quickly, making maintaining this profile a little bit easier.
Part 2 – Google + for power users
Searching Google plus (original source http://www.billhandy.com)
A very nice way of setting up a custom search engine in Chrome to search for topics on public streams.
Searching Google Plus from billhandy on Vimeo.
Google+ Author tag (via Google webmaster support)
Google are supporting (and pushing) the rel=author tag and your Google+ profile to identify authorship in simple html mark-up, a very exciting feature! By organising authors of great content on the web, could it start allocating authority in the future? It does seem a fairly robust way of doing it. It can also help populate a rich SERP snippet. So if you are an online content writer have a look at the following html snippet:
Google Corporate pages
The proactivity of a number of brands has been reprimanded over the last couple of weeks. Google have been enforcing its terms and conditions with a hammer recently, telling brands to “stay out” of Google+ for now. The current pages are designed for people to network, not for companies or other groups.
It now looks like this lack of company profile pages is a bit more of a blunder on Google’s behalf than first thought. In an interview Vic Gundotra admitted that the company had “dropped the ball on this aspect”. Google have said that until it has finished and released its plans for business profiles it will continue to delete non-personal profiles, apart from a very small handful it will use for testing.
Written by Martin McAndrew
twitter: @martinmcandrew
