Google Plus: Who Cares Whether Your Friends Use It or Not

Neal Schaffer: 0:02

Take it take take take enjoyment. Welcome to Social Business unplugged, helping you understand in plain English how to best leverage social media for your business. And now, here's the founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody, Neal Schaffer, I hope that you had a great NDA or January of 2013. And we're off and running in February, I have some really exciting news that I hope to be able to share with you in the next few weeks about my next major project. But on to the topic of our podcasts for today, which is Google plus, now, you know that these podcasts that I create are only eight minutes maximum in time, because that is the only amount of time that I can record on my microphone application on my iPhone and be able to send an email to myself or to my audio engineer to process these podcasts. So I can go on for a long time about Google Plus, but Google Plus is one of those social networks that people are really passionate about either you're on Google Plus, and why doesn't the world understand it's not a ghost town? Or why should I care about Google Plus, none of my friends are on it. So as you know, this is a podcast that is meant to help you leverage social media for your business. And the importance of Google Plus, is there for your business, whether or not your friends are on and I had a chance to present to the Young Presidents Organization in Santa Barbara County this week. I don't need to say any names? Well, I mean, if you look at my tweet, you'll be able to forget who it was. But an extremely influential entrepreneur, venture capitalist was presenting really, really great stuff. And when someone asked him about Google Plus, he goes, Well, none of my friends are on it. So why should I care about it? Here's the thing. From a personal perspective, it's one thing you know, when I wrote my first book on LinkedIn, and I talked about Open Networking, and Twitter being an open platform, in essence, where you can communicate with anyone in the world you want whether or not they communicate back with you as another story, but it's a great place to start new relationships. And I think people that are very active on Twitter, appreciate that hyper social nature of the platform. You know, when I first talked about LinkedIn, I said, Look, if you're on LinkedIn, just connected with people, you know, then why even spend time on LinkedIn, just call these people you know, put them in a CRM in an Excel spreadsheet, there's really no need to use LinkedIn only to engage with the people that you do know, obviously, a lot of people will use LinkedIn to look for introductions from people that they do know. And this way, they're using LinkedIn to at least meet new people in that way, which is really a great beginning. And this episode is not going to be anything about Open Networking. But as you know, Twitter really is the ultimate open network. You know, Google Plus is not Facebook, Facebook, obviously, is where your friends and family are. But if you think of Google Plus more of as a Twitter, like open environment, and just as when you tweet on Twitter, you're tweeting on the world stage, it's been searched, it's been indexed by search engines. But the one search engine that really isn't indexing it, as much as it used to, obviously, is Google. Instead, Google Plus conversations are getting higher priority in Google searches, especially once you become a Google Plus member, and you have Google Plus Search Your World turned on, you're gonna start seeing in the top 10 results for any given thing that you search for, chances are one or two of the top 10 are going to be either a post from Google Plus, literally a tweet, in comparison, a post on Google Plus, or someone that you have in one of your circles with the little photo that says that they either blogged on the subject, or they themselves recommended it with a plus one, or they shared it on Google Plus with a plus one and with a comment and what have you. So in that way, our circles are greatly influencing our search results in Google, we all know the power of Google just cannot be underestimated. So if you were just to have conversations on Google Plus, and they were being prioritized in Google Search, and the bigger of a community of a relevant community that you can build for your business, the more those conversations that obviously should be relevant to your business are going to show up in Google. It's really a no brainer. And I've really been surprised by some of the searches. Obviously, when I present on social media, and I talk about Google Plus, I show some screenshots, which literally shocked a lot of people where some of these Google Plus conversations however random, they may be show up in Google search results. One of them was when I just did a search for the word Thank you. And I forgot what prompted me to do that search. But there was a reason why I was doing that search. And lo and behold, you have your sponsored ads on top and like this yellowish color. And the first organic search result at the very top was literally from someone in one of my circles, Judy Gambia, who's also right now my most senior contributor at windmill network in the topic of social media and public relations. And literally it was a thank you that she had sent out to someone for writing this great blog post, but it was right there at number one. Well guess what number two was it was thank you.com Which I'm sure has way more inbound links than that Google Plus post that Judy shared has another one. I was looking for a conference room in Tokyo, Japan when I was there to do a seminar. I don't think Google Plus is as active there as it is here in the United States. Yet, when I did a search, I knew the name of the company in Japanese. I didn't know their website. So I did a search for their name. And then Kogi Shih Tzu, which is meeting room, the number one result was they're actually sharing pictures of their conference room in a post on Google Plus, it actually beat out their own website. So when you see results like that, you begin to feel wow, if you need any more background information on this, there's a lot going on with Google. It's not just Google Plus, there's topics like authorship and what have you, Mark Traphagen, another of these thought leaders on the women networking blog, just this past week wrote a great blog post about why your Google Plus network is more valuable than you think. Go to one of Mark drop Higgins posts. He's our main contributor for that category, I think it will really open up the possibilities in your eyes as to the potential there. So it's not a matter of if your friends are minded or not. Unless you want to sell to your friends or market to your friends and perhaps recruit your friends. We'll use LinkedIn for that. But you know, obviously, when you're in business, a lot of businesses just want to get brand recognition or brand awareness begin to create communities find influencers find content to share, no matter what it is. Google Plus is an active community. The numbers in the hundreds of millions are questionable, but I will put it up there in terms of active members similar to a Pinterest similar to an Instagram I always say Facebook, 1 billion Twitter 500 million LinkedIn 200 million users, and then you know, Pinterest, Instagram, Google plus all over what I believe right now, according to the data that's been shared, 100 million members numbers in Google Plus have been a little bit more aggressive. If you're looking for a way to start. Mark has written some great blog posts about please if you have not been on Google Plus even establishing a very minimal presence. And if you don't have a blog on your website, listing things on Google Plus may actually bring you better SEO than a blog post. And that's going to be a future topic for a future blog post. But until then, thank you for tuning in. I always welcome your comments. Please share with your friends and make it a great week. Bye bye. You've been listening to social business unplugged with meal shaper, social media author, consultant, speaker and university professor. If you'd like any specific topics covered on future episodes, or if you'd like to be interviewed for this podcast, please connect with me by email. Neal at windmill networking.com on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/neal Schaffer and on Twitter at Neal Schaffer. Please also visit windmill networking.com for daily Social Media for Business updates. Thanks for listening and make it a great day.