How to Create Opt-In Notification Circles on Google+

Practical Tips and Steps

First thing you must understand is that the average Google+ user hasn’t heard about opt-in 

circles and doesn’t know anything about them. So before going into details about how to 

subscribe, you should start by explaining about the basic concept of the opt-in circle. Don’t 

make the explanation to long, but do give your audience enough information about your 

plans. So here are the steps I’d recommend:

Briefly explain about what you’re doing:

“Hello friends! I’m creating a blog notification circle here on Google Plus! The idea is that each time I share a new post on my blog, I’ll send out a notification to this circle letting them know about the post.”

What’s in it for me?

As an initiative for subscribing, a cool thing you could do (but really don’t need to if you have

 great content) is promise to share exclusive giveaways or posts with that circle alone, or at 

least before your share them with the rest of the world.

Call to Action – Tell people how to subscribe (in a simple way!)

“If you’d like to be included in the Blog Notification Circle and be the first to know about new 

posts & tips – simply +1 this post and you’re in!”. Don’t forget to mention that people can 

opt out of the circle at any time. An alternative for this is sharing the post and then quickly 

adding a comment on to that post saying: “+1 this comment to be included in the notification 

circle!” and then disable new comments on the post.

Create a Dedicated Image

This worked great for me in my last notification circle, so I’d highly recommend using an 

eye catching bill consolidation design that clearly describes your goals and call to action.

Disabling reshares and comments on the post leaves only one option – +1’ning the post 

(is that English?!). Keeping the subscription process simple makes it easier for people to 

understand what they need to do in order to subscribe. When comparing this to a mailing list 

signup form on a website, I always find it easier when I’m asked to only fill in my Email 

Address and hit subscribe (rather than name, family name and so on).

Add all subscribers to your Opt-In Circle (Yep, this step is important…)

Great! So you’ve followed the above steps and people have asked to join your notification 

circle? Now it’s it’s time to add them to the circle! Head over to “activity on this post” either by 

hovering over the profile thumbnails at the bottom right of the post, or by going to the drop

down menu in the top right corner and selecting “activity on this post”. Next, hover over the 

names of people who’ve +1’d the post and add them to your “Notification Circle”.

Doing this one by is definitely possible, but rather time consuming. So be sure to check out 

Circloscope chrome extension and premium version which allows you to add multiple profiles 

from any post to your circles at once.

Send out your first post!

When you send out the post make sure to tick the “also send email to” box, and you’re 

all set. If you don’t do this, you missed the whole point and your subscribers won’t be 

notified about new posts.

Important things you should note

Even though it’s rare – it’s possible that even if you’ve done everything right, you won’t see 

the “Also send emails to …” checkbox. If this happens it’s probably because most people 

who’ve asked to opt in aren’t following you, and in that case Google+ will not allow you to 

send emails, and this is done to prevent spammer from bombarding your email with spam 

messages.

The solution for this is the following – determine which people in the circle are not following 

you (this can easily be done using Circloscope) and then do one of the following things: 

Reach out to the non followers in order to explain the situation and ask them to follow you. 

Unfortunate, but remove the non-followers from your notification circle. After doing that you 

might need to create a new notification circle in order to refresh the backend system.

I’m repeating this because it’s important – let people know that they can opt out at any time. 

It’s also a good idea to occasionally send out a message to your notification circle alone just 

to ask and make sure they still want to be included.

Conclusion

Google+ notification circles are great in so many ways and can easily become a part of your 

marketing tools. When writing your opt-in post remember to keep things clear and offer a 

simple way for people to subscribe to your circle. Think twice before you share a post with 

your notification circles and never send spam. Remind people of the option to opt-out and 

most important – share great content. If you do – people will never even think about opting 

out.

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Has Social Media Become the Most Important Way to Advertise?

Unlike traditional marketing, social media advertising has made it easier for business managers to sell their products, services, or content to online users with less effort and money. No need to turn on your TV or grab your local newspaper to see advertisements in the morning — just check your Facebook or Twitter on your mobile phone. With just a few scrolls, there it is: advertising.

Let’s take a look at some of the popular social media platforms and see how advertising works and why your business should go digital.

Facebook: Like and Share

Photo courtesy of Steve Nicholls via Flickr

There’s no denying Facebook is the most popular thing on the Internet with its limitless sharing and connectivity to about 1.23 billion people worldwide, 945 million of which access through their mobile phones. Brands active on Facebook don’t only enjoy online exposure but can also update their followers on what’s new, promote special deals, and occasionally hold online contests. They also create focused ad campaigns that target a carefully selected audience.

The “Like” and “Share” buttons are viewed more than 22 billion times a day, not only on the network itself but across more than 7.5 million websites worldwide. In fact, Facebook even created Like and Share buttons side-by-side “to drive Facebook referral traffic to your website.” Additionally, brands that use the retargeted ads in Facebook users’ news feeds report 49 times more clicks than right-hand sidebar ads.

How do I begin? Your best bet is to create a Facebook Page (not personal profile or group page) where it’s a free avenue for everyone to peruse on your content, whether they become a follower or not. Next, come up with a plan: your target audience, the number of posts you will write a day, when to post, what material to use, and your tone. Make sure you follow other pages to gain more followers, too.

Twitter: “On the GO” Network

Photo courtesy of Maryland GovPics via Flickr

Twitter is notorious for its no-nonsense 140-character tweet limit that makes content direct to the point. But don’t get discouraged: while Twitter enables visual tweets (photos, videos) in its turf, it seems that its 650 million users worldwide prefer textual tweets more. Plus, a BostInno survey found that 49 percent of respondents would rather interact with brands in 140-characters or less, beating Facebook.

Twitter updates real-time with 9,100 tweets every second, amounting to around 58 million new tweets daily. Since many Twitter users use their mobile phones to tweet, this might just be perfect for business managers to target people on-the-go. Twitter also offers three different kinds of paid advertising: promoted accounts, tweets, and trends.

How do I begin? An official account, of course. Then acquaint yourself with hashtags (#), retweets, mentions (@), and direct messages. Aside from the brevity of your content, you need to sustain visibility by tweeting more often since every tweet has a very short expiration date. Don’t get too trigger happy now – you don’t want to spam or annoy your audience and lose followers.

The “Trends” pane on the left side lets you know the current buzz in the Twitterverse. Meanwhile, business managers can search for keywords related to their business and track people’s conversations, what piques their interest, and how to better improve marketing content. These can be monitored and responded to accordingly using dashboard tools like HootSuite, TweetDeck, or Commun.it.

Instagram: Photo Finish Marketing

Photo courtesy of Jason A. Howie via Twitter

This mobile-based network has hooked more young people than other sites with its limitless photo sharing spiked by image filters and enhancements. What makes this unique is that users share mostly original and creative content, mostly labeled with hashtags (#) so others can have access to their content.

Business Insider reported that 90 percent of 150 million Instagram users are under the age of 35, a demographic many brands could take advantage of: apparel, entertainment, and media. Since it’s a mobile app, people on-the-go are more likely to use it and hit “like” on posts. In fact, this Facebook-owned social media platform can turn into a mini-marketplace as entrepreneurs do a SFS (shoutout for shoutout) where they advertise their fellow entrepreneurs’ content and vice versa.

How do I begin? Interesting photos and creative content posted on a frequent basis. Like Twitter, Instagram operates on hashtags (#) and followers. But you have to use them cleverly, so you may as well acquaint yourself with the most popular hashtags. And do what entrepreneurs do – SFS.

Pinterest: Inspirations and DIYs

Photo courtesy of Bunches and Bits {Karina} viaFlickr

Pinterest is a good place to put your crafty hat on and get your creative juices flowing. Here, content is devoted to provide inspiration for various crafts, recipes, and DIY projects as 70 million users, mostly female, pin them to their Pinterest boards. In fact, Pew Research found that a third of American women are Pinterest users.

According to marketing firm Piqora, each “pin” attached by a user to her interest boards is worth an average of 78 cents in additional sales to the brand whose merchandise is featured, and reported that sales-per-pin is up 25 percent in nine months. Adobe also reported that site visits from Pinterest yield 55 cents a piece in revenue, up 150 percent year-over-year. A study by Shopify also found that orders driven by Pinterest are larger than those produced by Facebook or Twitter, at $80 per order, topping Google and Amazon.

How do I begin? Your selling point is a virtual album bedecked by high definition photos of your product, services, or even your crew. It also won’t hurt to follow the DIY path to lure more followers, but make sure to fortify it with photos, illustration, and other graphic content. Go snitch those pins, tiger.

Google+: The Plus Factor

Photo courtesy of Mookieh via Flickr

Google+ rubbed us the wrong way but it’s starting to pick up speed now. If you want your content to make it to the search results, list and reach out 550 million users that are mostly students, tech-oriented professionals, bloggers, and photographers, then you might want to give Google+  a try and be active.

Unlike other social media platforms out there, Google+ calls for intelligent content — so you may want to make every word count. It’s like digital marketing at its best and Google thinking for you. Thus, you need to use relevant keywords and consider your search engine optimization (SEO).

How do I begin? As a brand, your best bet is a Company Page. As mentioned, you need to craft your content cleverly and weave relevant keywords through it for your SEO. Communities are strong on Google+, so widen your network by interacting with communities related to your business and do so in a clever fashion. It’s like doing business with conscience: offer value to people and understand that participation in communities is mostly about giving. Hard selling and spamming simply don’t work here.

There are many ways to advertise and reach out to various demographics via social media, depending on what your business is about. But all of this would be for naught if you have no metric telling you what these numbers meant or if they translate to profit at all. Avinash Kaushik’s social media metrics are good yardsticks for social media effectiveness.

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Import Your Facebook Friends to Google+

One of the best things you can do when trying to grow your following on a new social network is to find and connect with any existing friends or followers that you have already on other networks.

 

As I've learned over the past couple weeks, many people think that it isn't possible to import their Facebook friends into Google+, but there are actually a couple ways that can be done. In this tutorial I show you how I do it using Circloscope.

  To get started you’ll need the following:

• A Yahoo Mail account
• Circloscope Chrome Extension (Free or Premium)
• A Google Plus account

Step 1 – Import Facebook Friends

What we’re going to do in this step is import your Facebook friends into your Yahoo Mail contacts and then we’ll export them into a format we can use for the following steps. A Yahoo Mail account is needed since it’s the only way to get access to the contact information of your Facebook friends.

Import your Facebook Friends

To import your friends, log into your Yahoo Mail account and locate your contact list. You'll find it by clicking the contacts icon just below the Yahoo Mail logo in the upper left of your account. Once on your contact list, select the Facebook option in the left-hand menu to bring up the Facebook import option.

Click the Import button to begin the import process, you'll be prompted to log into Facebook if you're not already logged in.

When the process is complete you should get a success message like the one shown here on the right. Simply click the View Contacts button to see all of your Facebook friends that we just imported to your Yahoo Mail contacts.

Step 2 - Export your Facebook Friends

Yahoo Mail provides a couple options to export your contacts but the only one that will export all your Facebook friends in a format we can use is the Print Alloption.

The Print All option is located on the Actions drop down menu that appears just above your contact list. When you select the Print All option, Yahoo will launch a new window with your Yahoo Address Book ready for printing.

It should look a lot like the below image, but longer since it contains all of your contacts. We are not printing the address book however, what we need to do is extract the email addresses from the print document for use in Circloscope.

Step 3 – Extract Email Addresses

To extract the email addresses from the Yahoo Address Book what we need to do is copy the entire document to our clipboard and then paste that content into a tool that will allow us to extract just the email addresses.

Copy the document to your clipboard

To copy the text I clicked within the document and selected all the text with the keystrokes CTRL+A (the blue in the above image is showing that I've selected all the text) , I then copied all the text to my clipboard using CTRL+C. You could also click and drag with your mouse to select all the text, and then right click within the document and use theCopy menu item. 

Extract the email addresses

The simplest way to extract the email addresses is to use an email extraction tool. 

If you are uncomfortable using a free web based tool for this, it is possible to extract the email addresses using programs like Excel or Microsoft Word, but I won't be covering that in this tutorial for simplicity sake.

To use the extractor, load the extractor and click within the top box labeled "Enter text with e-mail addresses to be EXTRACTED" and paste all the text from your Yahoo Address Book that we just copied to your clipboard.

 

Once you've pasted the text within the extraction box, click theExtract E-mail Addresses button to run the tool and you'll receive a nice list of just the email addresses in the box lower on that page labeled Final Filtered Result.

As you can see in the image to the left, I was able to extract 260 email addresses for my 314 Facebook friends. There are only 260 emails because not all of my friends have their email addresses available on Facebook.

Now you should select all the email addresses and copy them to your clipboard so you'll have them available for the next step.

Step 4 - Paste Email Addresses Into Circloscope

Circloscope is the only tool that allows you to locate Google+ users from a list of email addresses so you'll need to have either the Free or Premium version installed.

Either version will work, except that Free won't allow you to add all your friends to a circle in bulk, you'll have to add them one by one (it's still pretty quick unless you have a ton of friends to add).

To paste the email addresses into Circloscope, you'll need to open Circloscope and from the top menu go toDashboard > Profiles > Emails / Google+ IDs as you can see in the image to the right.

That will launch a popup window where you can paste the list of your Facebook friend's email addresses that you copied from the extraction tool in the previous step.

Once you've pasted in your email address list, click the Ok button to start the search. After a moment or two you should see some results like those in the below image.

As you can see in the upper right of the results, Circloscope found 136 of my Facebook friends out of the 260 email addresses I used in the search.

Circloscope won't find a friend for every email address because not everyone has their email address publicly available on their profile (and some people just have not joined Google+ yet) but it's still a massive timesaver over trying to find 136 people manually! This is especially useful for those of you that have more Facebook friends than I do, as I know many of you do!

Step 5 - Add Facebook Friends to a Circle

In this step we'll add all the Facebook friends on the results page from the previous step to a circle so we can connect with them on Google+. To select everyone on the results page you use the Select menu that appears just above the results on the left side.

You'll want to Select All as you can see in the image to the right. Note thatSelect All will only work if you are using Circloscope Premium, if you are using the free version you can add people to a circle one by one by hovering over their profile card and clicking the plus sign that will appear in the upper right of their card.

Once you've selected everyone, the Action menu will appear to the right of the Select menu as you can see in the below image.

To launch the Add to Circles popup select Action > Circles > Add to Circles.

You'll then be presented with a popup that allows you to add your Facebook Friends to one of your existing circles or a new circle. I chose to add my friends to a new circle labeled Facebook Friends as you can see in the image to the right.

When the process completes you'll get a success message for Circloscope indicating that your friends we're added to your new Google+ circle. You should then log into your Google+ account and check your circles to ensure everything worked as it should. As you can see below, mine worked out perfectly!

Next Steps

Once you have your Facebook friends in Circloscope and Google+ there are a few other things you may like to do.

Filter

Using Circloscope's filtering options, I split my Facebook Friends into two different circles - active on Google+, and inactive. I also added all of them to my white list so that I won't be at risk of inadvertently unfollowing them in the future.

Reach out

I also used Circloscope's filters to find my Facebook friends that were not following me back on Google+. I put them all in a special circle and sent them a brief "Hi, Facebook Friend" message mentioning that I just found them here on Google+ and thought we should connect here as well (about half of those have already followed me back).

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10 Reasons to Combine Search and Social

The combination of search and social is one which cannot be ignored and must be embraced by all. Search engines have changed the way they rank your business because of the integration of social media signals when looking at search algorithms.

Around 58% of consumers will go to a search engine to look for something online and 40% of consumers will seek further advice from friends or colleagues on social media. Combined, around 48% of consumers are combining both search engine and social media functionality to seek help for their purchasing decisions. Here are 10 reasons why combining search and social are important for your business.

1. Social Impacts Your Search Ranking

Google, especially have moved into making their search algorithms more social based. These changes make social signals very important when Google determines who sits at the top of search.

2. Social Search is About Relevancy & Authenticity

Connecting with your community on social media is all about offering relevant content that is authentic and helpful to their business. Building trust and a good reputation for your brand is so important so remember that ranking high in search isn’t just about keywords, its about the relevance and authenticity of your site, in general.3. Social Has Already Integrated Search

You may not know that social has actually already integrated search functionality. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ all have search functionality, along with the second biggest search engine (and also social network) YouTube.

4. Combining Search and Social Delivers Twice the Results

A business that uses a combined search and social approach for their marketing strategy receive twice the results in terms of conversion and revenue per click. If you want more profitable results for your business, you will need to combine the two (as you can see below).

5. More Exposure for Your Brand

The more exposure you can get for your brand, the more likely people are to trust your business and see you as a leader in your industry and to do that, you need to harness the power of search and social.

6. You Can Target Specific Demographics

Social media can help you easily distinguish between certain groups from a particular category or demographic and target them for marketing. Focusing your website based on your target market and what they are looking for online, combined with targeted social media marketing will help you chime in on customers you may not realise were looking for your product.

7. Connects with Mobile Search Users

With so many social media users, actually using networking apps on their mobile give you the chance to connect with these users when combining your social and search marketing approach.

8. Better Overall Promotion of Content

As with most combined marketing tools, you will increase promotion and that’s no different when combining your search and social approach. Content won’t be shared more unless it is high quality and content your target audience wants to actually read.

9. Establishes Your Identity and Ownership

When it comes to ranking in social search, your online identity and ownership is very important. You should strive to have your content verified for authorship. This can be done through Google’s Authorship programme.

10. Combined Social and Search Delivers Great Customer Service

Social media in itself, is a great customer service outlet and your business will thrive if more and more people are sharing positive comments about your business. If 48% of consumers are already using the combination of social and search, you need to be able to deliver first class customer service which will impact how well you rank in search.

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How to Use Google+ to Your Advantage

Google+ is trying so hard to be everything that people have complained Facebook isn’t. They aren’t quite there yet, but that isn’t completely the fault of Google+ itself. The majority of the blame for Google+ not taking off is on the shoulders of people and companies who have been slow to adopt it and slow to figure out how to really use it to everyone’s advantage.

With Facebook wreaking more and more havoc every day—charging users large sums of money to be able to reach their own followers, giving away more and more of users’ privacy protections and even making the posts of kids available to the broader public (unless a specific box is checked on every single post made by that kid)—it’s weird that people haven’t been jumping ship in larger numbers.

Remember: Facebook didn’t start out being the “powerhouse” that it is now. It started out small and stayed small for a long time. It was the users and the marketers who made it the useful tool that it is supposed to be today (in spite of higher ups making decisions that actively impede that progress). It was the early adopters who spent time tinkering around and figuring out what to do and what not to do.

You can do the same with Google+. Here are some tips to help you get started.

1. Heed the Golden Ratio

Before we get into any other details, we’d be remiss if we didn’t remind you about the golden ratio of marketing. The golden ratio dictates that your blatant sales pitches make up no more than ten percent of your total social media activity. It’s a hard rule that marketers follow on Facebook and Twitter and you need to follow it on Google+ too.

2. Sign Up for Authorship

Google Authorship is something offered via the Google+ system and it allows you to claim the content that you publish elsewhere on the web. When you publish an article or piece of content anywhere on the web and link it to your authorship profile, your picture and a link to your Google+ profile will appear in the search results along with the actual article itself and the listing for the article itself will also have your Google+ profile picture next to it. 

It’s a way to prove your authority in a single glance. If you haven’t already signed up for Google authorship, do so immediately.

3. Use Your Circles to Your Advantage

Facebook simply limits your reach (unless you pay). Google gives you the ability to limit your own reach. Put another way, Google allows you to highly target your own marketing. With Google circles you can make sure that the people who most want to see certain types of messages will see them and that those who don’t care about that particular issue won’t. You can make your circles public or private. 

Matomy, for example, has made public the circles in which the company appears, but keeps its own circling system private. This lets Matomy show off its popularity while respecting its own followers’ privacy.

4. Link Your Websites

Your Google+ profile offers you the ability to list your company’s website as part of your contact information. Obviously you want to link your company’s site there. It is also important to make sure that your company’s website links to your Google+ profile. There are a lot of great widgets and buttons available that will do this in an elegant and non-intrusive way. 

This is important because unlike other social media portals, the Google+ button allows people to add you to one of their circles without forcing that person to leave your site. You can add followers without risking “the distraction factor” costing you sales.

5. Use Photos

When you look at your Google+ feed you’ll see that, instead of the “straightforward” timeline approach that Facebook uses, Google+ presents your feed in a grid format, allowing you to see lots of different stories at once. This is why photos are important. Often your “grid box” will consist simply of whatever photo you’ve used and then a few words from the post itself. Users then click on that grid box to see what else your post has to say. If you don’t use photos, your posts will likely get lost amongst the “flashier” options in a follower’s feed.

6. Sharing More Often Works In Your Favor

Keeping the golden ratio in mind, regular participation in the Google+ world helps you build authority and, in turn, your audience. And, unlike other systems, participating on other peoples’ posts (and promoting those posts to your own feed) helps build your reputation and authority within the system. 

This means that you don’t have to constantly come up with unique content to share. Sharing someone else’s content is just as respectable…and helps you better respect the golden ratio (and win your audience’s loyalty). 

Make a point of sharing something or promoting something every day and a habit of posting your own unique content at least every other day. You’ll be amazed at how much your numbers will grow after just a couple of weeks of that routine.

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Pinterest and Google Plus: Two Peas in a Pod

Cross-platform strategies are an incredibly powerful social media tool. The approach works exceptionally well with Pinterest and Google Plus. I recently did an hour-long live video broadcast with Peg Fitzpatrick and Rebekah Radice to discuss this topic.

What follows in today's column is a summary of the top lessons from the show. I'll include a couple of video clips to extract the show highlights so you can get most of the value without having to watch the whole show!

Strengths of Google Plus

Firstly, don't believe the articles that come out from time to time saying that Google Plus is dead, or that Google is abandoning it. It's a live and vibrant network with lots of great discussions going on, and Google is actively releasing new features all the time.

Two of Google's recent major releases include: +Post ads which was released April 16, Google Plus Stories, which was released May 20, and Google My Business, which was released June 11. These are major new features that clearly indicate Google's ongoing commitment to the platform.

Google Plus has some significant advantages over other platforms as well. Here are some of the most important ones:

1. The Platform Encourages Long Form Content: On Google Plus, it's quite natural to write lengthy posts. It's also pretty common to get long form comments back as well. The result is that the discussion threads can get very involved and result in a lot of fantastic give and take between the participants. If you want an in-depth dialog, Google Plus may just be the best place to get it.
2. Robust Formatting of Posts: Part of the way that long form content is supported is through more robust post formatting features. This includes the ability to use bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, and emoticons. These features are available to commenters as well, not just in the original post.
3. Easier to Make New Connections: Google Plus is more open, in that you can directly message people you are not currently connected with. This gives you more avenues to build relationships without having to rely solely on commenting on someone's stuff, and hoping they decide to connect with you.
4. Impact on Personalized Search: People who follow you will see your content higher in the search results. In addition, if they follow someone else, and that person +1s or shares your content on G+, they will also see it rank higher when they search on relevant terms - often 10 positions higher or more. Properly leveraged, this can have a significant positive SEO impact for your business.

Google Plus is also a great visual social network, with features like full-column-width and multi-column post images, large link images, Auto Awesomized photos and videos, and the new Stories feature that automatically turns your travel or event photos and videos into an interactive album. These visual features are where it intersects with Pinterest!

Strengths of Pinterest

One of the advantages of Pinterest over Google Plus is that on Pinterest, you can save all your most awesome stuff and then find it again easily. People have come up with "hacks" to save favorite posts on Google Plus, but it is not as easy to do, nor is it easy to find them again. On Pinterest, you can have numerous topical boards, and finding an older piece of content you want to share is as easy as visually scanning the right board.

Pinterest pins also seem to have a longer "shelf life" than content on most other social networks. Peg and Rebekah have observed that some pins of theirs that got thousands of repins a long time ago are still getting hundreds of repins today. Pinterest seems to bring content that has received a lot of pins back to the top of peoples' streams again and again.

Here is a short summary of their main points:

1. Create 10 boards.
2. Pin five things to each board.
3. Write good descriptions for the boards and pins that include keywords.
4. Connect with and follow 10 people a day.
5. Pin at least three new things a day.
6. Tweet at least one of your pins each day.
7. Add a link to your Pinterest account in your Google Plus profile.
8. Put a link to your Google Plus profile in your Pinterest profile.
9. When pinning content from your blog, be sure to add a link to the original post on your blog to the pin description.

As with all social networks, getting started may seem tough, but the above formula should get you moving on Pinterest pretty quickly!

Getting Them to Work Together

There is a tremendous amount of leverage when you can coordinate your efforts between two different social networks. As Google Plus has great visual feature support, it's a natural fit with Pinterest. By being on both networks, you can significantly increase your overall reach. You never know where your prospects are most active. If you reshare your Google Plus content to Pinterest, you have the opportunity to be discovered by Pinterest users who don't use Google Plus, and vice versa.

Because Pinterest is such a great platform for discovering new content, one useful tactic is to browse Pinterest for something that would be interesting to your Google Plus audience, and then share the pin of that content on Google Plus with a longer form introduction to get a discussion going. Don't forget to link back to the original pin (with something like "Pin this for later!") in your G+ post.

Google Plus and Pinterest also make a nice matchup because Pinterest is generally a lot lower maintenance than Google Plus. When you create something on Google Plus that has a nice image, all you have to do is pin that image to an appropriate Pinterest board. Of course, you will get greater benefits from Pinterest if you're active there, especially in repinning others' pins, but you can do that whenever you have some extra time.

One of the reasons why these platforms work so well together is that you can use the exact same image in both without having to resize the images. You don't have to create a specific image for each of those two, as you do have to do for other platforms such as Twitter or Instagram. This shortens your time in creation and editing mode while extending your reach and effectiveness.

There are now tools such as Canva that allow almost anyone to create images for their online content that will be more sharable and look good on Pinterest and Google Plus. It's critical now to have large format images on your blog posts. That makes the posts more likely to be pinned, and they will grab more attention on Google Plus, as Google Plus is more likely to display the share as a large image post rather than a thumbnail.

Bear in mind that integrating Google Plus and Pinterest will only work well if you are very clear on your own social media marketing strategy. You need to know your purpose for using social media, who your target market is, and what kind of content they crave. Of course, this is good advice for any social media strategy.

Because they consistently integrate content across Google Plus and Pinterest, Peg and Rebekah have seen traffic to their sites skyrocket from both networks. It has created a 1 + 1 = 3 scenario for them. For example, Peg found that she started having good success sharing some of her best pinned images from Pinterest to Google Plus, where those same images also did quite well.

Content curation is one way Pinterest can help you do Google Plus (or really any social network) better. You can store all your best resources on various topics on Pinterest boards. Then when someone on Google Plus asks you for the best resources on a topic, you can just share your relevant Pinterest board with them. This works best if you have created different boards for each major topic area you address.

Another idea is to create a Pinterest board for "My Hottest Google Plus Posts" and pin your most popular posts there. This can make for great reshares on a periodic basis on Google Plus.

Summary

There are many ways to get these two great platforms to work together. Once you get started, you may find it quite compelling!

As we have noted, being on more than one platform exposes you to new audiences, and Google Plus and Pinterest make a great pairing. Sharing content back and forth across these platforms can bring you a great deal of leverage, and you may find, as Peg and Rebekah did, that it brings more traffic to your site as well!

Updated Image Sizing Guide for Social Media Profiles

Facebook

UPDATE: Facebook haven’t only changed their dimensions, they only allow users to chat with their contacts via the messenger app only. Gone are the days of needing just one Facebook app, now you are forced to use two.

Twitter

UPDATE: Twitter have completely changed profile pages for users, allowing for a more visual experience.

Google+

Linkedin

YouTube

Instagram

UPDATE: Did you know that you can actually post images to your instagram account from your desktop computer? 

Pinterest

UPDATE: Pinterest have now introduced their “Guided Search” giving users a more extensive search field

It is so important that you follow the above guides to get the right sized images, because if your social media appearance looks messy your potential customers will automatically let this affect their overall opinion of your business.

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