Maybe I’m a little late since Pinterest rolled out its redesigned profile pages two weeks ago, but being fashionably late is kind of my ‘thing.’ Users and businesses using Pinterest for marketing can now enjoy the benefit of more beautiful profile pages and an easier-to-use Recent Activity feature.
The redesign of Pinterest Profiles is more social, displaying influencers and a description. The profile page and its boards are more aesthetically pleasing and image-focused.
Before passing judgment on the latest updates, I wanted to take some time to actually use them first. While the profile page redesign was what dominated the news a couple weeks ago, I honestly think this change is of the least consequence to Pinterest users.
For starters, it’s a rare occurrence that I find myself actually looking at someone’s Pinterest profile. By its very nature the site can keep a curious browser occupied for hours at a time, thanks to the constantly updating feeds of pins. A user can explore pins by category (Art, Humor, Photography, Food & Drink, etc), or by looking at everything pinned by those they choose to follow. Its on these feeds that it’s easy to get lost and suddenly realize you’ve been flipping through delicious-looking photos of desserts you probably shouldn’t eat for over an hour (guilty).
But don’t get me wrong — I really like the new profile design. Borrowing from the social networks we all know and love, Pinterest profile pages are now more informative, displaying who influences you as well as who you influence. The top portion of the profile is reminiscent of Twitter, offering a 200 character description field and the user’s designated profile image.
BEFORE: Before the redesign, Pinterest profiles were blocky and uninspiring.
The user’s boards are displayed in a much more aesthetically pleasing way, showing the most recent pin on that board with thumbnails of several others below it. Like I said, I like it, I really like it! Much improved over the former profile pages which were very square and uninspired.
One new feature I haven’t heard much mention of is the added “Friends to Follow” feature above Recent Activity on the home screen. Improvements to the Recent Activity feed were enough to have me jumping for joy (finally, the stories are clickable!), but the Friends feature put the icing on the cake. While Pinterest already offered a Find Friends feature, it was not the most user-friendly. Now, I can follow friends without even leaving my homepage.
Pinterest users can now follow others without ever leaving their homepage.
According to Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann, who recently spoke at SXSW, the redesigned profile pages are just the beginning of big things in the works for the increasingly-popular social bookmarking site.
Word is that we will finally get an iPad app, and all I can think is “it’s about time, Ben!” In addition to the upcoming app release, the API will also be made public, much to the delight of developers. In January, Pinterest drove more referral traffic than Google+ and YouTube combined, which is all the more reason marketers should not ignore it as a tool for online promotion.
I’ll certainly be on the lookout for the iPad App and other new features to be rolled out soon. What would you change about Pinterest if you had the chance?
It’s always up for debate on what’s “newsworthy.” In the time before computers, newspaper and newscasts were the ones that dictated what was important in the world. What they considered “news” and a “must-know” became what was published and what we did know.
But now things are different — very different. With social media sites like Facebook, and Twitter, we are seeing more and more that the applications of social media as news source are quickly growing.
Let’s take the recent death of singer Whitney Houston, for example. Within the first hour of her death, over two and a half million people tweeted about the tragic story, averaging about 1,000 tweets per second. The traditional news outlet will not go live about such a story without proper verification, which takes precious time. By the time those outlets did go public, the story was “old news” to these two and a half million viewers: an entire 42 minutes late, in fact. Twitter was indisputably the first one to the finish line.
This is a prime example of the growing collective consciousness caused by these sites. Think about how many followers each person may have, then think about how rapidly a story as gripping as a long-beloved singer’s tragic death can spread from person to person. While this system has its advantages in quickly disseminating stories, though, its speed can be a double-edged sword; Twitter rumor-mongering can spread like wildfire, with false reports of celebrity deaths and other incidents gaining legs where traditional journalism’s insistence fact-checking would have prevented the publication of such a story.
Other “newsworthy” incidents that spread like fire at a gas station include the death of Michael Jackson, which averaged at about 493 tweets per second in 2009. The announcement of Grammy-winning chanteuse Beyoncé’s pregnancy had one of the highest ever with 8,868 tweets per second. Now let’s take something like the death of Osama Bin Laden, who is obviously not in the entertainment industry. This incident let to an average of about 5,000 tweets per second. The list can go on.
Can you imagine if another war would to start? How quickly the world would know. If Twitter was around in the 60’s, how fast would people Tweet about the death of JFK? The landing on the moon? The fall of the Berlin Wall? Single-source outlets and the “gatekeeping” of which stories are publicized are obsolete: all people need is a computer or a cell phone to have the entire web, with its intricacies and viewpoints and thousands upon thousands of stories at their fingertips.
These sites are not only used for the quick spread of breaking news, but for event gathering as well. For instance, the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to have popped up overnight across America. How did they do it? It wasn’t thousands of dollars of advertising: Occupy Wall Street was a completely Internet-based movement.
Using a great tagline, “We are the 99%,” Occupy Wall Street used tweets, Facebook events, and Youtube videos to get its message across. The effect of such a movement will definitely go down in future generation’s history books.
So let’s look at this from a business point of view: with the way that social media is evolving, how can marketers get themselves into the mix? The answer is that they must find a way to get people to tweet, Facebook share and interact with their product, service, or brand the same way the social media consciousness does for events and topics it finds important.
This is the future of getting your news heard and many successful businesses are already on top of this. They’re using these social media networks to get themselves talked about. Letting the consumer be the advertiser. The more a business’s product or service is shared and spoken about via these networks, the more brand targeting and awareness they get.
For example, on October 4th, 2011, millions tweeted and posted about the iPhone 4S. Over seven thousand people alone posted something about Siri, the new voice assistant application. Yes, Apple spent millions on advertising its obvious success — but a good chunk of the advertising work was being done for them by the social network community.
So where can this go? A stronger bond between companies and customers or celebrities and fans? A greater union between the citizens of Planet Earth? Time will tell, but the most important thing is to keep sharing, keep tweeting, keep posting, keep your place in social media — and the social web will evolve on its own.
Right now, we are in a crucial time in human communications, when the entire world is more connected than ever before and information spreads at the blink of an eye. Click like, share this post, or leave a comment — you’ll never know who you’ll connect with!
The next blockbuster young adult film is just about to explode onto the silver screen: The Hunger Games, based on Suzanne Collins’ bestselling trilogy of the same name. Aimed at the Twilight set of YA readers, it tells the story of a courageous tomboy named Katniss Everdeen who lives in a dystopian world that’s split into twelve districts and ruled over by an iron-fisted government called The Capitol. Each year, members of the community are selected to participate in The Hunger Games, where they are sent into an arena to kill one another until only one is left standing.
If it sounds familiar, you may remember a similar plot from the Japanese film Battle Royale. Collins put a new spin on the formula, people of all ages (myself included) described themselves as “unable to put the book down”, and soon enough, a Hollywood adaption was in the works. Like all majorly popular adaptions, the marketing of the translation can go a long way towards a production’s ability to succeed or fail. However, the brains behind the Hunger Games campaign are clearly using every ounce of the power that social media has to offer to promote the film, and so far, they’ve pulled it off marvelously.
Viral marketing played a major role in finding “Recruiters” to represent the twelve districts that exist in the original story, who are actually hardcore fans that were chosen as volunteers. By harnessing the power of excited fans, these Recruiters spread the word around to other fans about the film and hyped up the details in such a way that allowed them to feel they played a major role. Still, the Recruiters don’t know who “hired” them — just another interesting part of the puzzle. But they did mention something about free uniforms…
As for the official Facebook page, it’s used some tactics you’d expect from a marketing campaign, but also has popped up with some great surprises too. One really smart offer was to make your own free ID card (see, that’s mine up there!), which assigns you to a district and gives you the chance to have the ID sent to you for free. It also redirects you to a page with personalized merchandise from your district — it even has your name on it. I admit, the fan in me drooled at the idea of having a t-shirt or a bag with the logo and my name on it. It’s an angle I haven’t seen much of in the past, and I fell for it.
No viral campaign would be complete without representing the dark forces of whatever you’re promoting, and The Capitol homepage knows it. This district for the rich and powerful of course has a flair for fashion, and a retooled Tumblr represents it at Capitol Couture, which shows off all the elaborate looks the people of the Capitol flaunt to show off their money and clout. The people behind the Hunger Games PR campaign even went as far as partnering with beauty company China Glaze to produce a line of nail polishes called the Capitol Colors — one for each of the districts, of course.
Twitter is not exempt, either — there are tons of accounts, including ones for all the sites I’ve mentioned above, a official Twitter, and one for the Hunger Games 24, which allows fans to win tickets to advance screenings. Fans who have gotten their IDs and district assignments can also hashtag their tweets with it,creating twelve sets of fans who are all meeting other fans because they are united by districts.
Using the structure of the book’s world as the backbone of their campaign was a brilliant plan, and the hype around the release of the Hunger Games is huge because it capitalizes a world we already know and have grown to love. By using the heart of what makes anything a success — its fans — this campaign has been a true victory, especially when it comes to getting people genuinely excited and sharing the word with family and friends with authentic enthusiasm.
I planned to be there on opening day (March 23rd) before the campaign started, but now I’m even more excited because I might be able to meet other fans from my district thanks to Twitter and the Facebook community. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. Are you going?
Welcome to a whole new shebang!
“Welcome to your Page Preview” is a frightening heading for any marketer, especially on a platform like Facebook that is so limited in design. But today, Facebook Page owners across the country are seeing the innovations that came to personal profiles move on up to the east side of business pages. Today, you can see your Facebook page with the Timeline Layout.
The
At the top-right of the page, a button for the Admin Panel looms. When opened, the panel contains a one-click view of a few major metrics for checking up on the page. Notifications, new likes, personal messages, and insights are all grouped together, with menus at the top to consolidate sharing, ad creation, and page and user management. This section vastly improves the page owner’s experience on the site, as it reduces the amount of places to look for useful data. At-A-Glance Notifications and Metrics
Cover, Tab Navigation, and Wall Control
Much like personal profile pages, the new timeline starts you without the main design point of the timeline: the cover photo. In addition, it starts you with a number of tabs that may not be the optimal ones for clickthrough, and your custom tabs have transferred their tiny icons to the tab window. This leaves a business or marketer a lot of work to organize and design their page. However, this work will most likely pay off with higher CTRs on the tabs, which are now prominent. Turn This….
These tabs are completely mobile except for Photos, which is always first, though through a relatively cumbersome “swap position with” interface. Each custom tab can be further customized in appearance by opening the tabs out and clicking “Edit Settings,” letting you change the tab title, which maxes out at 17 characters, and the image, which should ideally be in a 3:2 pixel ratio. This layout is a compromise, giving some flexibility while still keeping a uniform appearance, and removes any incentive to have too many tabs on the page, hopefully controlling low CTR to tabs.
Tabs have changed their URL structure as well, moving from a ?sk=app_[id] parameter format to a simpler /app_[id] URL. This helps with both SEO optimization of Facebook tabs and linking, as you can now more easily add tracking parameters for analytics tracking of your pages. It seems that the old URLs will lead to the same page without redirection or canonicalization, which seems at cross-purposes to the Tab URL simplification. …Into This! Parameter Values for ?filter=The menu marked “Highlights” adds a parameter of ?filter=, which sorts the wall posts for better management. Likely, this is the way to set the default behavior of the Facebook Page, though Highlights seems to be the ideal setting for most set-and-forget pages, as it will draw from all posts by friends about the page combined with posts by the page with high Edgerank. Furthermore, this is the only way to show both user-generated and business-created posts at the same times.
To the Window, to the Wall!
Where's the @mention?
The Timeline for Pages Wall is a fascinating glimpse into the depth of Facebook’s association technology. The first standout is taking cues from the “People are talking about” Newsfeed units. This scours Facebook for friends who are talking about, but not necessarily tagging, your brand. This opens up a Pandora’s box of marketing woes, but seems user-centric. These aren’t posted to the page, and only show your friends’ posts; if your friends have a bad experience somewhere, it won’t tarnish the brand for others, but show you that you might not have as much fun there. Seen this before?Other Wall units follow the lead of personal profiles: Milestones, which demark historical events for the business, enhanced Photos posts, and combined posts are at the core of the Wall redesign. One of the most intriguing choices by the designers is to consolidate other views of the wall into a “box”. Low EdgeRank posts are consolidated for ease of skipping
These likely low-EdgeRank posts are another compromise for a marketer. Comment spam and other undesirable posts might get combined and minimized into this box, leaving posts with higher algorithmic value to the visitor in more prominent places. The visitor may skip these posts when viewing the page; however they can be moderated from the “See All” link.
New Facebook Insights
Insights gets a minor facelift, becoming more report-like and visually appealing. The first glimpse is from the “Likes” Tab, prominent in the default tab setup. It provides an at-a-glance look at the vitality of the Facebook Page. Likes and People Talking About This are not new, but aggregating check-in statistics under “Most Visited Week” and “Largest Party” and photo tagging is a great step towards measuring the ROI of the social network. The Likes App is a killer way to get quick stats.
These quick-view statistics are derived from the traditional Insights accessible through the Admin Panel. Insights hasn’t changed, beyond following the less cluttered view introduced with Timeline for Business Pages.
Facebook Tabs
iFrame Tabs are some of the most vibrant parts of a Page, allowing a business to radically deviate from the traditional Facebook layout. Tabs are now true landing pages, stripping away much of the clutter and navigation from the page. This has allowed for more than 320 extra pixels of width in the tabs, paving the way for a richer and more interactive experience on the page. To boot, an understated tab switcher is at the top of the page. The App Tab is wider, with less clutter.
This stripping of clutter highlights a serious change in outlook for Facebook: there are no ads. While this may be a boon to users and a bone thrown towards European and American privacy legislation, advertisers are possibly losing another place to see a right-column-full of ads. As with the transition to Timeline for profiles, this has the potential to thrash the effectiveness of display ads on the social network.
What Does It Mean?
Timeline for Facebook Business Pages is the latest in a line of major and minor design tweaks that the social network has undergone. For marketers and business owners, the redesign offers deep integration with both the feel of the new Facebook and the inner workings of EdgeRank and other metrics. Timeline lets businesses tell their whole story while visitors read the posts most relevant to them about the business, taking from a wide variety of sources and methods of mentioning the brand.
These new changes, set to roll live March 30, are sure to keep all of us – marketers, business owners, and users – on our toes and creating the best social experience for our readers. Got any million-dollar ideas for the new layout?
Take Seven Steps to Social Media Heaven today! 90 million users can’t be wrong: Google+ is the newest and fastest-growing social network, recently opening its doors to small businesses. The multifaceted integration with search, social discussion and sharing, and the rise of a platform for authority has made Google+ a must for any business.
Sharing meaningful content and interacting with your users
Measuring what Google Plus does for your Business
Strengthening your site for Google Plus for Business
Going beyond social and making a difference in social-search.
Find out the latest tricks and tips in social media today. Download our eBook to get started.
What Can a Google Plus For Business Page Do?
With an engagement rate topping 60%, Google+ is a goldmine of social interaction. Hangouts with your users, highly-targeted circles, and integration with both search and other Google apps makes Google Plus for Business a worthy investment for any small business. But it’s a complex social network, and less intuitive than Twitter and Facebook — make sure you know how to traverse the rapids of this new social network by downloading our Google Plus for Business eBook now!
A well-tuned Google+ page can be a conduit for discussion, a traffic generator, and a wellspring of highly targeted and engaged website visitors both on and off the social network. Find out today how to focus the energy from Google+ to your business by building your business page and what aspects make effective social media campaigns on Google+.
Running around in Circles? Confused by it all? Contact Search Influence today to get your Google Plus for Business page running at full steam.
[SI Social is a monthly series from Search Influence that looks at what’s going on in the social media world.]
It’s true that most of us may have had a MySpace profile some year ago, but if you’re anything like me, you probably only maintain one major social media profile at a time. So when Facebook got big enough, I pretty much forgot MySpace existed. Then they tried to rebrand and made that ridiculous new logo and you couldn’t help but feel a bit bad for the days when they were king of the social media space. After all, it’s gotta be weird to look back and wonder what changed, right?
Still, when you get the right people in place, they may even have the power to revive old social media giants. Take celeb Justin Timberlake, who is also the co-owner of MySpace. At this year’s CES, Timberlake kicked off the event Monday with some information about how the website is rebranding to include online discussion and real time television. The latter will be called MySpace TV, and it will encompass the site’s 42 million songs and 100,000 music videos. In other words, like a little YouTube right inside MySpace.
Why should you care, you ask? Well, Timberlake says television combined with social networking is the best big thing. “Why text or email your friends to talk about your favorite programs after they’ve aired when you could be sharing the experience with real-time interactivity from anywhere across the globe?” he says.
So the idea is to chat and interact while you watch TV, which in turn means you’ll pay less attention to the actual program and be more distracted than ever. No offense, Justin, but in this world of constant distraction, I hardly think we need more. Still, surely there will be some people who won’t let the glittery loud memories of MySpace weigh them down and give it a shot.
When it comes to social media, it seems it’s less about what features your site offers and more about where your friends are. For instance, with last year’s Google+ launch, many users seemed excited by the prospects of the new system and to give it a shot over Facebook. However, a few months after the launch, most people were still sitting on Facebook. Why? Not necessarily because it provides the superior networking service, but because their friends were still there — and they want to be where their friends are.
What do you think of interacting with friends via social media while you watch a show? Do you want that option? Would you rather just send a text? Or do you want to be drowned in all the social media you can handle and more?
With the era of social media marketing only growing by the day, more and more business owners are realizing that maintaining a presence on websites such as Facebook or Google+ is not just an option anymore — it’s essential. Establishing a business page on these sites is the first step, but once you do, do you know how to make it interesting enough to keep readers returning for more?
A recent study posted on Mashable reveals some interesting information about how people view Facebook pages and what parts of them have the most influence. As you can see by the heat map pictured above on Starbucks’ Facebook page, people tend to look at a business’ wall first — and often for four times longer than any other part of the page.
The study also proved that images get attention too, as the page that had the most photos (PlayStation) made people stick around longer. It also taught us that having a person in your profile photos rather than just a photo of an item (a person drinking a Coke rather than just the can, for instance) elicited more of a response.
Another bit of common sense that popped up in the study was that content up top on your profile performs best — which falls perfectly in line with the studies about people’s general net attention span.
It is because of this element that the idea of keeping a page moving with consistent content is a good one. If people see the same thing at the top of your page every time they visit, they are likely to visit less, but seeing something new means the chance of them visiting more often to check out what’s new.
So now we know how to make our Facebook business pages that much better, but what about Google+ pages? Huffington Post recently offered some great tips on how to make the most of yours, including how to best set up your About page, create galleries, use Hangouts and more.
Do you have any tricks and tips that you feel are especially effective for you on your own business page? Or, when you visit another business’ page, what jumps out at you first or keeps you around?
Yesterday, Google announced three much-called-for improvements to Google+ Brand Pages. After receiving a lot of feedback over the last few weeks, the Pages Engineers have added some new features that should be received well among the G+ Pages community. Apparently, they really do care what we think!
Multi-Admin support! – Brand Pages can now delegate up to 50 people as page managers or administrators. These administrators can make updates and posts to the page from their own accounts. Adding managers is easy. While logged in as the Google+ Page, click ‘Google+ settings’ in the Google bar and select managers. Here, you can add managers by email address.
Streamlined notifications – When logged is as a Google+ Page, notifications now work as expected in the Google bar. Multiple managers are now involved in all activity that takes place on the page, and can be sure to keep up with the conversation.
Aggregate count of engaged users – Now, when a user looks at a Google+ Page, they will see a number representative of all +1s and followers. This number provides more clarity and reflects all users who have interacted with the page, as opposed to only those who’ve added the page to their Circles.
Unfortunately, the changes are rolling out gradually, so we haven’t seen the pages on our own G+ Page yet. It’s unclear how long the rollout will take, but check out these and other improvements to Google+ Pages and Profiles here, all debuting this week. As always, we’ll keep you posted with news and developments. Happy holidays!
As an admittedly addicted Pinterest user, I’d like to clear up a few things about the relatively young social media site and its potential use for marketing and SEO linkbuilding. With Pinterest quickly rising in popularity, I’m constantly hearing it referred to as a social bookmarking tool for sharing images. Pinterest is in fact a social bookmarking tool, but it is not only about the images. The site allows users to “pin” or save links to external sites in an organized way, with few limits to what type of site or image can be pinned. Users can save anything from a favorite blog post to products they love, from recipes to tutorials. Each and every pin not only pulls in an image, but also a do-follow link back to the source site! Can you smell the SEO potential yet? The brilliance of Pinterest is that it combines some of the most compelling features of social media in general: visually stimulating content and the opportunity to share your ideas, interests and inspiration. Upon signing up, users are provided with fully customizable “pin boards” and can easily find friends to follow using the Facebook and Twitter connected features.
As a marketing tool, Pinterest has great potential for small retail businesses that may have a hard time competing in search results. For example, a local boutique clothing store may find it incredibly difficult to outrank Macy’s and Saks in the SERPs for a keyword like “New Orleans shopping.” When users find something they like (usually pinned by someone they follow and are influenced by), chances are they will, at the very least, click the source link. Everyday I’m introduced to new brands and products on Pinterest, and more than once I’ve used what my friends are pinning as inspiration for making purchases. There are currently few brands using Pinterest, but with its popularity and the site’s high (and still growing) domain authority, all signs are pointing to increased use by brands and businesses in the near future.
A few tips for putting Pinterest to work for your brand:
Add the “Pin It” button to your product pages or blog posts. It’s easy to do and you can add the button along with your other social media sharing buttons.
Create a Pinterest account for the brand itself and reach out to “visual influencers” on Pinterest for help getting your images re-pinned. Pinterest allows any user to follow any other user without requiring a follow-back. You may also tag other users in your pins, comment on pins and re-pin (the Pinterest version of a retweet) others’ content.
Create boards beyond your own products and brand, but relevant to your location and industry.
Utilize the description fields when creating Pins by adding keywords and geo-modifiers. Not only is this SEO 101, but Pinterest addicts often use the search feature to find relevant pins.
Keep pinning! The search results and Pin feeds change up-to-the-minute, much like the Twitter feed and Facebook Ticker. Maintain a steady flow of Pins to ensure your products are staying top-of-mind.
For SEO linkbuilding purposes, the benefits of Pinterest are pretty self-evident. Some basic info on Pinterest links:
Each and every Pin links back to the original source site or the file location (depending on where it was originally pinned from). Unless you’re purposely optimizing for image seach, a product page or site link is probably better.
Standard pins provide links to the source site in two locations.
A Pin provides do-follow links in multiple places. The image itself acts as a link in addition to the “From:” link in the top right-hand-corner.
A pin comes with embed code for syndication to other sites like Facebook and Twitter, helping to develop backlinks to the Pin itself.
Pins are editable! You can edit your own Pins with updated URLs or reach out to Pinners who may have pinned your images from an unfavorable source site. Pins are easy to edit and the new URL you provide does not need to host the image, though I don’t recommend you use a link without the original image.
Because of the visual nature of Pinterest, it is a great way to promote infographics. Make sure they are Pinned to appropriate boards and contain relevant descriptions to ensure they are shared.
You can even add a Pin It button to your company’s blog pages by using the WordPress plug-in.
Thanks to the intuitive nature of Pinterest’s interface, I think the best way to get going is to request an invite and just dive in. Remember, sign-up is currently via invitation-only, so ask a friend to invite you or request one from the site (it doesn’t take long). Let me know what you think about these tips in the comments, and if my screenshots piqued your interest, follow me on Pinterest!
The new kid on the block has opened itself to businesses in two principal ways. Unlike Facebook, which focuses on admin-managed pages, and Twitter, which couldn’t care less if a person, place, or animal is represented in a feed, Google initially maintained its focus on people in its business-level implementation of its social network, not announcing any kind of branded pages. Then Monday’s announcement of Facebook-style business pages opened a new avenue for marketers, if only those in selected niches. Both new tools allow for the implementation of the “authority” metrics hinted at in numerous Google quality documents.
But should a business even have a Google+ presence? Facebook of course is ubiquitous, and Twitter has proven itself to be a direct customer relations tool. Google+, however, has languished as Robert Scoble’s main soapbox and Android users’ photo repository. Google+ isn’t a lead generator, lacking the customization of Facebook tabs, and it isn’t a customer service tool, lacking the plurality userbase (8% of the US) Twitter enjoys.
Applications of Google+ for Business
But it’s not just those on the social network who will benefit from business applications of Google+. Integration with search and the use of the network as an authority metric seem to be major advantages of Google+ for businesses. Once set up correctly, a robust Google+ profile can give authority to local ranking and regular integrated SERP rank depending on page type. Unsurprisingly, this leaves the active maintenance lacking; however, even that aspect can be worthwhile in the right niches.
Internally, Hangouts combined with Google Docs allows decentralized businesses a face-to-face online collaboration tool. Users can avoid the loss of communication from short text comments in edits, enriching group writing and design. This use of Docs can help a variety of businesses, both for internal meetings and for work with clients. The possibilities previously hinted at are relatively endless, and make Google+ a must-have for remote businesses, some design firms, and any company needing to build something in front of a customer or each other without being in the same room.
But most companies don’t need that kind of ability for real-time document editing. For them, Hangouts provide a simple way to start webinars, live shows, and other almost TV-styled content. Something like SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday could be live broadcast with question-and-answer, recorded locally, and quickly uploaded to YouTube or another video site, then added to a website for further life out of the content. If live videos would take too much effort, even a simple video exclusive to Google+ can help drive uses both to your Plus Page and create user interaction. This kind of direct, personal, and instant communication with users and the ease of creating something for all visitors is nearly unprecedented in social media.
How Your Employees
Keeping with the focus on both users and non-users of the network, Google+ offers ways to interact with customers outside of the realm of the social network — being the only outlet for rel=”author” and introducing rel=”publisher”, the best way to get your personal face and name ad your company’s image in the SERPs. Reinforcing the authority metrics hinted at in Panda and the related effects, Google+ is the gatekeeper for bridging the gap between semantic and visible authorship in the SERPs, and the exposure and connection of a face and name to a business can humanize and connect with customers in a way that couldn’t be done for someone who isn’t just signed into Facebook. “The face in the SERPs” is perfect for any company with a regularly maintained blog or article section. Similarly, a company might see its logo next to its web site when rel=”publisher” is implemented.
Using Google+ to Put Your Face in the SERPs
Happily, WordPress sites have a relatively simple solution for implementing a multi-person rel=”author”. It does the first step for you, linking to the author page with rel=”author”. Then, add your canonical Plus account url to the Website field in Your Profile under Users:
Place your canonical Google+ url in this field under User > Your profile
Then, you need to edit the theme, adding this to the body of either your main template, or the author template, author.php, omitting the if-statement:
<?php if (is_author()) {
$curauth = (isset($_GET['author_name'])) ? get_user_by('slug', $author_name) :
get_userdata(intval($author));
?>
<a rel="me" href="<?php echo $curauth->user_url; ?>">
Visit me on Google+
</a>
<?php } ?>
This will get the author name if it’s set, then get all of the user data, then display the url from that author in a link with the all-important rel=”me”.
Oops! Not what you'd like to see…
Similarly, to set up rel=”publisher”, just a link tag on all pages without rel=”author” on it will connect your site with your company Google+ Page. Why only on those pages? Because as Search Engine Land’s rich snippet test shows, Google will prioritize author over publisher.
Once it’s all set up, check your url in that same Rich Snippet Tester tool, making sure it shows your face and name. The wait time on recognition from Google is inconsistent, but such connections are key to establishing authority.
Google+ Establishes Thought Leaders
A secondary effect of individual commercial Google+ profiles is that giving a face to a URL can create a sense of thought leadership, pulling in longer-term researchers with high quality informative articles and blogs. Having one author connected to your name will heavily associate the one person with the site; having multiple writers will strengthen the authority of each writer as an individual source of quality knowledge. A logo, if well-chosen, transforms the SERPs into display ads. Through either, one positions their employees as experts and their company as prominent: certainly an admirable position.
Google+ might not be for every business, even businesses that rely on their current Apps as the underpinning for their online productivity. However, for businesses with the specific needs for which Google+ provides killer apps, Google+ is a perfect addition to the social media profile of your business. Furthermore, it’s ease of setup provides deep support beyond social interaction, leaving much utility even for more straightforward businesses.
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