Top Three Marketing Tools for Google+ You’ll Love and Use

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Do you need to focus more on Google+? Do you have a hard time building your community on Google+? In today’s post, we will tell you more about three versatile tools to build your presence on Google+ and get more additional value for your business.

1. Friends+Me

With Friends+Me, you can automatically shares content from Google+ to your other social networks by checking your Google+ business page and/or personal profile at regular intervals. If new posts are found, they’re reposted to any social networks you have associated with Friends+Me. Friends+Me has some excellent configuration options available, yet you still need to spend some time setting them up. Once that’s done, Friends+Me is a solid tool to share your Google+ updates across multiple platforms. This is an example of how Friends+Me works:

Features

In addition to auto-syncing your Google+ content with other social platforms, this tool lets you:

  • Connect your established social platforms. Friends+Me supports Twitter, Facebook business pages, groups and personal profiles, LinkedIn profiles, groups and pages and Tumblr public pages and private blogs.
  • Selectively publish. You may not want to publish your content to all social networks, so you can append specific hashtags to indicate which platforms you want to share with.
  • Integrate bit.ly tracking links. You can share content using either the Friends+Me web address shortener or you can use bit.ly. Both link shorteners let you track how your audience responds to your linked content.
  • Include Twitter inline images. When you attach a picture to your Google+ update, it’s visible on Twitter as well. Since visual content is a major part of community engagement, definitely try this feature and see how your fans react.

Friends+Me has several sections to help you maximise your sharing:

  • Timeline. The timeline shows the updates you have recently posted on Google+ that were reposted to another network (e.g., LinkedIn). You can click on each update to bring you to the actual post in Google+.
  • Queue. Any items that are in the queue will be published at the time set in the Scheduling section. If you don’t have automatic scheduling enabled via the Scheduling screen, then any new Google+ posts are placed here in the queue. You can either post those immediately or manually set a posting time for each update.
  • Scheduling. This section is where you set up your sharing schedule. You can specify that posts be sent to a social network at a specific time interval after the original update is published (e.g., 30 minutes later). You can even set it up so updates are reposted on specific days and times. For example, in the screenshot below, the Google+ updates are scheduled to be reposted to LinkedIn on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at various times during the day. Schedule your Google+ update to share on specific days of the week.
  • Routing. This section lists the Google+ pages or profiles you want to share updates from. So if you only want posts on your personal Google+ profile to be reposted to LinkedIn, you would specify it via the Routing screen. You’ll also see which of your accounts aren’t currently connected to Friends+Me.
  • Link Shortening. By default, Friends+Me uses its own link shortener so any links you share will have fplus.me as part of the link. You can change this to bit.ly if you prefer.
  • Setup. The setup options depend on the social profile you are configuring. Each platform has parameters you can specify. For example, if you’re setting up Twitter, you can specify a character limit (e.g., 110) to allow room for retweets.

A great feature is you can tell Friends+Me to always link back to your Google+ update instead of the original post on the web. Different setup options for each profile type.

Summary

Friends+Me is a useful tool to share original content from Google+ because you have total control over how, where and when content is shared.

2. Google Chrome “Do Share”

When you want to share company news via your Google+ brand page, there may be times you want to schedule it to go out via your personal profile too. Unfortunately, the usual content management tools can’t do that. Chrome has a plugin that solves that problem: Chrome Do Share plugin. However, your computer must have the Chrome browser open at the time you want the content delivered. This is because the Do Share plugin runs directly on your computer and the posts you schedule are stored in your browser. When the scheduled share time arrives, the posts are sent to Google+. If Chrome isn’t open, you’ll have to reschedule the posts.

Features

While it’s important to configure the plugin properly to get the full range of features, once that’s done you can:

  • Schedule content to update to your Google+ personal profile and/or your business profile.
  • Schedule content you find while you are browsing through Google+ posts. This is an extra option added to Google+ posts so you can schedule delivery of this content at a later time through Do Share.
  • Specify a title. The title appears in bold on the first line of your Google+ post.
  • Enter the details of your post, and make a comment about the link you’re sharing.
  • Mention and add people to your post. When you add people, they are notified and it can be a good way of catching someone’s attention.
  • Create a poll, add an image or add a link to your post.
  • Publish your post immediately or schedule it for later.

Friends+Me and Do Share have different strengths. What’s nice is that they work well together. You can share content via Do Share and then Friends+Me will pick up that content and share it out to the social networks you have configured.

Summary

If you want to schedule and share content to your Google+ personal profile, Do Share is your solution. It’s easy to use, gives you control of what’s shared and works well with Friends+Me. The only downside is that you can only use it with Chrome.

3. Steady Demand

Steady Demand is a Google+ audit and analytics tool. The audit is free while the analytics tool is paid. To use the audit tool, go to Steady Demand and click on Launch Tool to reach the audit page. Enter your Google+ brand page URL and click TEST. The results will show you an overview of what’s working on your page and what’s not. If you scroll down, you can see an analysis of the last 10 posts on your page. Posts are graded on three criteria:

  1. Post length
  2. Mentions
  3. Hashtags

If two out of the three criteria are met, the post passes. Steady Demand also available in Pro version, which provides detailed analytics on your Google+ business page.

Features

Now that you have your basic audit, you can upgrade to Steady Demand Pro and get many more features, including these:

  • Dashboard. Your dashboard is a quick view of your overall performance analytics.
  • Post Quality. Steady Demand reviews individual posts and assesses their quality, then provides recommendations for improvement.
  • Engagement. You can see the details of engagement on specific posts.
  • Alerts. Steady Demand warns you if an update has low engagement.

Summary

Steady Demand gives you an idea of your current Google+ success with its free audit. To really dive in and improve your Google+ presence, you need a Pro account with full analytics reporting—which includes monitoring your competitors. By watching your competitors, you can evaluate what’s working for them and adapt your own strategy as needed.

Conclusion

As expected, Google is integrating Google+ efforts into its suite of tools. It’s more important than ever to establish a presence there. It may take some effort to build your community on Google+, but the tools in this article will get you on the right track.