When you think about Google Plus, you don’t think it as a place to meet friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues and relatives. It is not the social media channel that Facebook and Snapchat are, but that was never the intention. It was designed as a social platform to Google’s many entities for users to share a common interest. So when we try to compare it to these other networks, Google+ is getting portrayed negatively. In recent months, Google+ has undergone a series of changes to provide more user-friendly experience. Let’s take a closer look at these developments.

Criticisms of Google+

When it first launched in 2011, many consumers simply viewed it as an attempt to compete with Facebook and tap into their market share. One of the biggest gripes with Google+ was that if you already had a Google account set up to use Gmail, YouTube, etc., you automatically had a Google+ profile created for you. Look at the freelance tips, and you will see many negative reviews.

Technically, Google+ has more than 2.5 billion profiles, but many of them do not get used, so when you get down to how many of these individuals are active on the network, it’s hard to say. Many posts shared on Google+ are done privately, either as a post with contacts or a particular circle and it is difficult to track it. As per Google, they have estimated the number of monthly active users to be 300 million, which is a little less than Twitter.

From a business perspective, a common criticism is that you are required to have a Google+ page to take advantage of the local SEO benefits associated with Google My Business. Google My Business hosts company information like hours of operation, locations, industry and contact information shared across Google’s entities. Anyone searching for your company or industry can find cohesive information and get directed to your website or physical location.

Communities and Collections

With many changes, the site was officially relaunched as the “New Google+” on in Nov’15 to promote this new image and focus on the communities and collections features. The platform was redesigned keeping in mind the new changes Google is releasing in their search algorithms and making it compatible across devices, whether you’re using their app or a web browser. Social marketing is a major freelance work, and if you are a marketer, you can include G+ posts in your daily for your clients.

Google+ Communities were new after the internet boom, and through their recent revamp have brought vitality back to user’s streams. Rather than only scrolling through a post, you can take a more targeted approach to search and entertainment. As per one estimate, there are 1.2 million joins to communities every day, so Google+ may have finally found its specific place in the Social networking market. Your posts can be shared with a circle or publicly also. On creation of a new collection, new tab opens up on your profile so that your followers can choose to follow any that are of interest to them.

Some important Reasons for using Google Plus

  • G+ isn’t a space for temporary, limited, few character updates and it is not for meeting people at one place and sharing updates. It is different because it is part of the biggest technology platform on the planet.
  • Only in one and half year the platform has grown considerably and established itself as the second biggest social network in the world. Be a part of this new experience, one which sooner or later everyone will join.
  • Immediate Indexing of all posts on G+ is an excellent feature.
  • Google is offering an innovative way to relate to the world, and especially to your world. Through the personalisation of Google’s search engine, they give you the opportunity to find precise information related to your interests, preferences, and to those of your social environment.
  • The +1 button allows people to establish what’s trendy, beyond those robotic algorithms that rank a website.
  • Adding authorship is putting your profile picture next to your content in Google search results. It also allows you to build up your status and raise trust among users, thus affecting the traffic, and the visit numbers.
  • Social Sharing has a close relation with high Google Rank. Google is tight-lipped about the specifics of their ranking algorithm, and every year the major SEO houses release lengthy analysis reports to determine which factors contribute most to a website’s ranking. Some latest analysis shows that while social sharing numbers are probably not directly included in the algorithm, but there is still a high correlation between social sharing and Google rank. You are helping the Off-Page SEO of your website with using this community actively.
  • Google+ is part of Google’s SEO features. From the beginning, there’s always been some speculation that Google does some tricks to elevate content posted to Google+ in an attempt to give their platform a competitive edge.

How to Effectively Use Google Plus

Now you know that it is important for your business to be on Google Plus, but fortunately, you don’t have to spend a lot of time cultivating this social network. Just having a business page and garnering a handful of positive reviews will help you gain most of the benefits available through Google Plus. The platform is free, and you can explore it very quickly and easily. There is a small learning curve to understand the new features.

Summary:

You need to be on Google Plus, but you don’t have to use it unless you have a lot of spare time on your hands. That’s just the way the situation is. It doesn’t take much time to create a Google Plus business page, so get started now! Though you will find a lot of criticism on Google Plus, you have to think about it from a different angle. If you do not use Facebook or Twitter paid services, how good they are for your business? Google Plus has a strong foundation and has some advantages. Instead of considering to eliminate this tool from your SEO and business strategy, you can think about how to use it in best possible way.

 

Kitty Gupta
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