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Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, cause organizations, businesses, brands, social media managers, Web publishers, bloggers, individuals.
Lately, I’ve been using Google Plus as a way to find, collect and create content.
Here are some examples of what I’ve been doing — I’d love to hear your thoughts on these uses for Google Plus.
Search
The search features in Google Plus are extremely robust. You can search public posts, posts shared with you, personal profiles (the parts that are public or shared with you), Pages and Sparks.
You can even use Google’s Search Operators when searching Google Plus. This allows you to fine-tune the results and save time.
When you do a search on Google Plus, you can also save the search in your left sidebar, under “What’s Hot.”
Discover
A common way to use Circles is to categorize people you follow based on their area of expertise. I have a circle that includes nonprofit techies, where I’ve discovered useful articles, ideas and discussions.
What makes using Circles different from using search is that Circles allows for off-topic discoveries that could never happen with “pre-meditated” searches.
Collect
When we think of Google Circles, we normally view them as a tool to organize people. But why not create circles for storing content that you’ve discovered on Google Plus?
You can do this by creating a circle and adding only you to this circle. When you do this, anything that you share with this circle will only be seen by you. This stream is located under your profile image with all of your other circle streams.
Create
When you create a private circle as described immediately above, you can add notes, links and even draft ideas for your content piece. Remember that no one can see any of this because you’ve shared the circle with yourself (you also don’t need to lock the post).
How have you been using Google Plus for creating content?John Haydon delivers social web strategy solutions for “the quick, the smart, and the slightly manic.” Curious? Then visit the John Haydon blog, follow him on Twitter or leave a comment.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.
Great post.. would also like to know how to submit an article. This is an excellent comprehensive guide but its like a few smaller ones with more focus that go into detail about individual campaign aspects!
John, these are great little tips. Just yesterday evening I was wondering how I could track discussions without having to send to Evernote or the like. This is perfect. Thanks.
Glad you found it useful!
Thanks, great Ideas, Just tried to add myself to a circle, which works. Pretty cool idea.
Google Plus is so much better than FB. Even though there are less People on G+, G+ gets more votes on http://www.googleplus-vs-facebook.com
Mine too.
Thanks, great Ideas, Just tried to add myself to a circle, which works. Pretty cool idea.
Google Plus is so much better than FB. Even though there are less People on G+, G+ gets more votes on http://www.googleplus-vs-facebook.com
Hello John, The tips you have mentioned here are really great. I think Google Plus is good to use. I like the privacy provided by the Google Plus than in the FB. I am sure that after some years Google Plus will have more people like in the FB. Thank you for sharing this great information with every one and keep sharing information like this one.
I support you. Very interesting!
Great post, I enjoyed ready reading it
Very informative. But you know what my #1 problem with G+ is? Time.
With FB, Twitter,etc., I can just kind of post my content and respond to comments and so forth. But with G+, I have to search, organize, post, comment and on and on. Just not enough time in a day for me.