With an active user base of over 550 million people and more than one billion registered users, it has become vital for businesses to incorporate Google plus into their marketing niche. Moreover, its business friendly features and its unique ability to improve search engine ranking are additional incentives to join the platform. Therefore, using this social media platform to build your brand enables you to increase the online exposure of your business by boosting your SEO efforts. Therefore, it is vital to learn how to increase Google plus followers and your exposure on this fast-growing social media platform.
- Engage with other members in meaningful ways
Besides posting regular updates, images and useful links, it is vital to be active and engage with other users in a one to one basis. For business profiles, such engagement is mostly limited to people posting messages, post and queries on your page with occasional posts on some communities. However, real networking takes more than just liking (+1) other users’ posts. You must follow and also interact with active people in your niche. Therefore, you must go through their posts in order to make meaningful and thoughtful comments and also participate in relevant communities, hangouts and discussions.
- Figure out the optimal time to post and engage with your audience
It is vital to rotate the post time in order to figure out when you can get the best results. Depending on the time zone, age group, or occupation of the target audience, updates or posts made at different times of the day can yield different results. Although the quality of your posts is very important, knowing the best time to post yields maximum exposure and engagement (response) from the target audience. The best way to figure this out is simply to test and compare. However, if posting manually at specific times on a regular basis is not feasible, you can use tools such as Bufferapp for reliable custom scheduling.
- Build your authority using hangouts on air
Hangouts on air are an effective way of branding your business as an expert. On the other hand, if your business is an authority on a specific subject, Google hangouts on air is a great platform to impress and engage your target users. Although it requires some time to prepare, plan and promote the hangout on air, it is worth all the effort. Therefore, besides helping you build a good following, organizing a hangout on air once in a while is also a great step towards establishing your business as an authority.
- Create events through Google + and invite followers
In order to promote the hangout, it is vital to create a circle of Google + users that you want to target. Create events for your hangout and send invitations to people in the circle you have created. Use compelling banners and titles to entice more users. Moreover, you can also encourage your invites to share such information with their followers and other contacts. The event can be made public for anybody to join and participate unless you want some sort of restriction on the attendees.
Posting useful content and updates regularly is an effective way of gaining traction on Google plus and staying fresh in the minds of followers. Therefore, when they need your services you will be their first alternative.