Google+ and tracking, what signals matter most?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I'm trying to get a feel for how to best to use G+ to make connections while ensuring it also promotes my interests. Figuring out who shares my interests and which topics from my site to share isn't as easy as it might be.

example: My website is not about SEO, marketing or even the internet in any way but Matt Cutts has been the #1 suggestion for me the past couple of days.

I have looked him up on Google to get his take on some things I plan to change on my site, but that's it. So that means my suggestions are at least partly based on my search history, does that mean I need to get people searching for me too? (tongue in cheek question).

Right now I see the biggest users applying a carpet bomb approach where they mention nearly every latest article from any site related to their subject of choice and it's working for them. They will link out from their G+ stream but not from their websites.

SINCE your social status is somehow intertwined with your Google ranking it's become important to know which signals matter most... but as you can see I'm still clueless. Which do you think matter most?

[tedster]

I think that Google+ is so young, and so underdeveloped, that anything we guess at is bound to change. Right now, the early adopters seem to be marketers - and that's a really rough sample. If they can't get general public involvement, they've got bupkis.

Are you working with a business profile or your personal profile?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Personal profile, if I sell a site or buy a site or even retire from being a webmaster I still want the profile to have some value to me (contacts).

[tedster]

That's the source of your confusion, as I see it. You can use a personal profile as an "ordinary citizen" - that should be very natural - or you can set up a business page and use it in a marketing fashion. It's going to create a conflict if you want to do both with one account. A nail is a nail, and a screw is a screw. Can't really substitute one for the other, you know what I mean?

[rango]

My strategy is to use my personal account as just that, something personal. Being real is how you get followers on G+. Trying to just post links results in nothing useful at all. Many of the same rules that apply on Twitter, also apply on G+. With one of differentiating factors being that you can post longer posts and therefore the occasional more in-depth post will be appreciated. In my opinion, most people who have dismissed G+ do so, because they haven't really connected with any of the community on there yet and are trying to use it like FB (which it certainly is not like at all). Building contacts is what G+ is good for, much more like Twitter than FB, except in my experience the engagement is better and the people are less spammy.

Be sure to make it clear what your interests are and search for people with those interests. The BEST way to grow a following is when a circle gets shared with you in it. If that circle goes to a lot of people, you'll be seeing a whole bunch of new followers. I've had up to 100 in a day as a result of a circle being shared with me in it.

That also is a great way to promote a page. Here's how: create a circle (on your personal account) with no more than 100 people / pages in it on the theme of your page. Put some effort into ensuring the circle is full of people who are active on G+ and engage frequently. Don't include junk. Then share that circle, with your page in it, and *be sure* to tick the option to *notify* all those people that you shared them in a circle. People are prone to resharing a circle that they themselves were in. And people quite frequently just add all the people in a circle to their own circles. So your page will (hopefully) be followed by a lot of new people as a result.

Maintain that circle and reshare once a month or so after tweaking fixing it up. This way you set your personal account up as the authority on this subject and your page gets lots of followers.

Getting the momentum behind you early is crucial with a network like G+.

I have one page on there which I set up early on and post to once or twice a week and it can get up to 100 new followers in one week now. Ones that I only set up recently are much harder to get up and running, but the circle sharing tactic has so far worked a little and once they have momentum I think it will be much easier.

To find people with similar interests, just use the search and maybe search with a term like "<interest> circle". That should bring up some shared circles on your topic of interest and those could each have as many as 500 people in them.

[rango]

Should add, you can use your personal profile as something personal and still +1 pages from your site. Whenever one of the people circling you searches on Google, your page will be boosted and might appear on the first page for them when it otherwise wouldn't.

Since your +1s don't need to be shared to your stream, you can +1 hundreds of them and not have a spammy looking profile.

[tedster]

Being real is how you get followers on G+.

A big Plus One from me on that comment! Really engaging other people is why social media has mushroomed. Merely trying to exploit it for some hoped for SEO advantage is just plain tacky and in the long run, not very savvy.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I agree Rango, Tedster, but that poses one big dilema as a webmaster. The content of my website and the popularity of my personality and social manner are not linked. One could be great and the other not so much.

Its a problem because if I want information enough that I search for it I want to find GOOD information, not a good G+ personality.

G+ seems to require 100% attention or complete and intentional ignorance from a webmaster. Having a little used profile may be worse than not having one, imo.

[netmeg]

My people are on Facebook. But I made Google+ pages, and I made a separate personal profile to attach them to (which I don't think you're supposed to do, but I don't care)