Obviously, most people just want to be connected with their friends online and aren’t that particular about the format of that connection. That means that most of the 1 billion active users on Facebook are fine with it, thank you very much. The same goes for the 240 million on LinkedIn, the 560 million on Twitter etc.
But some of us care about a richer media experience, safer, more private sharing methods, and easier discovery of great content by specific groups of people we care about. And - most important for business – we also want our the stuff we share to positively influence Google search results, which is still the number one way that the world discovers new things.
For those of us, Google+ is a better social channel with the very best mobile app of all social networks, but it’s missing an essential ingredient: the friend network we have built on the other networks, like Facebook, for most of a decade.
Google+ is a Replacement for Facebook
Google Plus is a powerful sharing network but, until most of our local and familiar peeps are there, we don’t think of it as very social. And really, in that sense, it’s not yet and may not be for a long time.
However, because of how it’s built, I discover and share considerably more content and share it with specific private groups or people like my wife, my clients, my business community and, yes, the public.
Google+ encourages sharing in a way that no other network does and that makes it the best network to put at the centre of my sharing activity.
A Little App That Connects Your Networks
I know it’s not always cool to share the same content across all networks but, for small and medium-sized businesses who don’t have the resources to optimize for the nuanced differences between social networks, sometimes it is. More often now people are focusing on one network more than others and not taking fault with finding the same content in more than one place.
Following is an interview with the Founder of Friendsplus.me, Alois B?la ka, on why he wanted to share to all from his one favourite network and how it is meant to be used:
Friendsplus.me is a simple online service that connects all of my major social networks and posts everything I share with the Public to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. I can create a custom, automatic, re-sharing schedule for each network, manually reshare to specific networks with a simple hashtag protocol, or just have everything reshared a few minutes after I post it to Google+.
For now, I still use Buffer to schedule posts – except I only share to one account: Google+. I let Friendsplus.me take it from there.
Making Up For the Duplication
Once your content is on another channel you can always edit it a bit by asking a specific person on that channel a related question, tagging a few people, or adding or removing hashtags from the post. Most importantly, you’ll still get notified and pulled into conversations that emerge on a specific network.
So the origin of where you posted originally really doesn’t matter a whole lot. For the most part, I have abandoned Hootsuite for everything except listening. That kind of engagement is still important but getting the content on all networks in the first place has become a lot easier and Hootsuite is not our preferred method anymore.
I don’t expect everyone to jump on this but for those who already know the superior value of Google+, this simple little service makes it easy to make Plus the centre of your sharing activity without causing you to lose the social networks you’ve built elsewhere.
Do you think Google+ is important to your company yet? How are you using it?