Yes, I know!  I have heard from most of you telling me how lame Google+ is and how all of you assume your friends and family do not use Google+.  Well, it probably is time you reconsider Google+ especially if you want what you post on other social networks to be seen by more than five of your friends.  Those who do use Google+ regularly like me, sing its praises.  And all us Plussers have a great reason to be praising Google+

Consumers Tire of Facebook Games

According to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, who performed a survey of 180,000 consumers who use all social networks showed that Google+ scored a satisfaction rating of 81/100. Compared to Facebook scoring 68/100 in consumer satisfaction.  Yes, these are consumers which includes people like you who claim they only use the internet to keep in touch with friends and family.  Yeah, Right!

There is no denying advantages Google offers users because of the automatic SEO only Google+ can offer.  Whilst Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are walled gardens, restricting Google from accessing much of their user’s feeds. 

Google+ is gratefully open to Google’s web crawlers allowing content to be indexed and served up in search results immediately.  You may not think that openness of Google+ feed to Google means much to you who only post socially, more personally, directed message, but it does. 

You may think all of your thousands of high school friends are seeing your post on Facebook, but in reality, only about 1% will see 90% of your posts.  That is a lot of wasted effort, isn’t it?

Organically produced content originated from Google+ actually rank in Google Searches where a website may not.  So, if you are searching for your high school classmates you would find them on Google.

As Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page who said:

“If you ignore GooglePlus, Google Search will ignore you”!

How You Benefit From Using Google+

There are a number of benefits to using Google+ as long as you are willing to dedicate the necessary time to make it work,

Target Messages – Circles enable you to communicate directly with certain groups of people, places, and things. Yes, Friends and Family included.  For example, a large high school graduating class use Circles to share content and broadcast directly to fellow classmates and send targeted emails.

SEO – Each post made on Google+ has a unique URL. This means that it can appear in the SERPs of Google.  And given that for all users like high school graduation classes, appearing at the top of Google search results is the holy grail, especially when it comes to finding long lost classmates.

Reach – For those who choose the smart digital marketing strategy of combining business with personal social media, Google always ranks its own products higher when it comes to SEO.  This means YouTube videos turn into Gold for businesses.  A post on Google+ is more likely to show up in search results than other web pages or ahead of competitors who do not use Google+.

So if your customers and BFF’s use Google+ getting involved using Google+ would give you a good opportunity to get their attention.

So if you only use social media for business, then Google+ is the ONLY place to be if your strategy is to be found by your consumers.

Local SEO – The integration of Google+ into the Google search engine means that searches for local businesses are only getting better. When a search is performed for a local place, Google uses factors such as the amount of +1s on a Google+ Business Page to determine which information ranks highest in the carousel results.  So if you’re looking for more page views on your website, sharing content to get more +1s is a simple and quick to help you achieve your goal.

Engagement – The network is interest driven, rather than generic like other social media sites. This means that there are some very active and passionate communities consuming and engaging with the content of interest. It is a great way to build a niche audience or broadcast to the world.

Usability – There are also a number of usability benefits over other social networks;

• there are fewer advertisements (YEA!!!);
• you can write longer posts,
• visuals can be larger,
• videos are preferred over ..gifs:
• posts can be formatted to make them unique,
• you can share content with only relevant circles so there’s more chance that people will read it.

It is time you take another look at Google+.  It is a much better social network than the others and doesn’t play a lot of games with what you post or what you see.  The time spent is rewarded for quality engagement with Real People.  It is a safe place to meet new people.  For businesses, it is the ONLY place you content is shared freely and connects immediately to the Google Search engine.

Google+ is just a comfortable place to be.  So, after a long day of getting beat up by fake ads and posts from people you don’t know on Facebook, step back over to Google+ and take a break.  Then, once you get over there… Let me know how I can help.