The Bloggers Guide to Using Google+ Effectively - Circles

Good morning everyone, it's Chef Dennis and I'm here today with Jean Layton and we are here for our series, The Blogger's Guide to Using Google+ Effectively. And today we're going to talk about circles and how to set them up and how to use them to your best advantage. Because, you know, if you start when you're just growing your circles now, that's a good time to get yourself set up because later on it can be a nightmare and it can take you weeks, trust me. To fix them. So, and I'm saying that from experience, personal experience. So that's not something you want to do. So I'm going to turn it over to Jean Layton, and she's going to get started and share it with you, and we'll go from there. If you have questions, you can ask them as we go. We are covering Circles today, so if you have questions about other topics, you know, we will get to them shortly, but today we're mainly, you know, we're just talking about Circles. Next week we'll do more of a review, and you can ask a lot more questions for us, but today we want to. We'll cover circles and get that taken care of. So Jeanne, there you go, take it away.

Hi everybody, welcome back. If you've been here before and if not, welcome to the series. We're trying to do the basic how-tos of Google+ setup. This week we're talking about how do you keep the people you are following in a way that you can use the information that they've given you. It's about relationships. So I wrote a post, it's up on my blog, the Wingwoman Production Blog, and I'm going to be referring to it a teeny bit because it's important to understand that circles are a way of maintaining a filing system for you to use the way you need to use it so that you can contact who you want to contact when you want to contact them. So most of the post is really dense, but I'm going to switch over to a screenshot. This is where you start out when you're just new. Assuming you have not yet followed a single person, this is what you're going to have. You've gone into your People column and you clicked on Your Circles and you have just these 4 defaults. Friends, Family, Acquaintances, and Following. Now realize that that's Google's way of saying, here's some suggestions, none of which you have to take. I don't have any of these anymore in my list of Circles, but this is a great way to start. Remember, it's all about the people you are following. It has nothing to do with who's following you. It's your filing system. The first thing I did was I looked for people who I wanted to listen to and I started popping them into Circles. In the post I explained a little bit about how I created some of my Circles. I made up a fictional— well, not so fictional, it's me. If you know a food blogger mom of twins who lives in Seattle and writes and blogs about gluten-free food, gardening, raising chickens, and knitting, You can put her into a food blogger circle, a mom circle, a twin mom circle, a Seattle circle, a gluten-free circle, gardening circle, chicken raising, knitting, and a YouTube user. I'm sure everybody can think of a thousand other ways to slice and dice that information.

Jean, your screen share is not up.

Oh. Well. You know, hang on. Is that up now?

No.

I don't know what's happening with the tech. Okay, hang on one second. I'll try and screen share it again. That better?

I still see you.

Well, you know what? I don't know what's happening with it. It may be because I'm trying to show just a visual, so this week maybe we won't be able to do the screen shares. Let's see. How's that?

Nope.

Nope. Okay, well, we're going to just keep chatting. I'm going to attempt to get it, but for some reason it's not popping up this week. The joys of Google. Sometimes things don't happen the way you'd like them to happen. One more time, screen share. Let's see if this is— there. We have these defaults. What I did was I started to create what I needed for me. I know I needed a gluten-free because I write gluten-free. I know for me, knowing where people live or where they work is really important because I travel for conferences. I travel for book signing events and that kind of thing. And having even one person in a location makes all the difference for comfortability. The people at Local Plus are some of the nicest and kindest people. It's as if everybody remembered their manners when they came over. They want to help everyone who helps them back. Perfect relationship. When I have a group of people in Seattle or I have a group of people in LA or I have a group of people in New York City and I know I'm going to that city, I can tap them and say, "Hey, where's the best place to go for dinner?" or "I've got a book signing at fill in the blank. Do you know how to promote it in your town?" People love to help, so it helps to be able to tap them. But if I didn't have them in a circle, I'd be scouring through thousands of followers to try and figure out who to tag. And so what I did was I started to create the circles. I'm going to flash back over— this is my circles. Down here is how many circles I maintain. Now, it's a filing system. It's like dropping a piece of information into a folder. I don't have to look at it every day. I can just access it when I need it. And it's so much simpler to do it that way. Some of the circles I've used are very short-lived and one of the things that I'm going to flash back to— oh, hi. I get Dennis in here. Sorry about that. I'm going to stop the screen share. One of the things I did with circles when I first started out was every time I attended a hangout, I created a circle with the hangout name and a date and allowed myself to grab all the different people that I met at the event, be they the production people, the people who were hosting, the actual guests on the event or the people who were actively engaging in the comments. I put them all into a particular circle. Once I had that circle, I could go back and talk to those folks later. Some people, I liked what they were talking about. I could use their information. I could reshare it. We could engage and they became a friend on Google. Those friends would move into a different circle based on things I found out. Like Chef Dennis Littley is in, I think, 7 of my circles, and that's one of the big benefits because I know he's a food writer, obviously. I know he talks about food in very broad terms. I know he lives in Florida. We're in a couple of other communities, so I have him in those circles. Because of that, if I need to reach out to Chef, I can just go to one of those circles and share just to that little group without having everybody else on Google be vaguely annoyed because they're seeing information that's not important to them. And that's something to remember is when you're using your circles, you want the information to be relevant to who you're sending it to. So please don't send me a private note about your latest recipe. It's not going to be relevant to me as an individual. Put it in public, tag me, but don't privately share it. It's one of the quickest ways to have people go, "This person doesn't understand the platform and I really need to just not have this annoyance." So there's My Big Circles. It's not hard to set up. You can name your circle anything at all. And then one of the bigger situations, one of the best things about it is you can take a circle like this is my gluten-free circle. Oh, wait a minute. Sorry. I'll go back to screen share. So this is the group I opened up, is my Gluten Free Circle. And in a circle you can edit it, share it, or just delete it completely. Editing means you can create a circle description. It's a great place to hide a hash— not hide a hashtag, but it's a great place to put a hashtag. So when this gets sent out onto the world of Google+, it's contained within the description. So if anybody's searching for that keyword, they'll be able to get it. And then you can just share it. It'll pop up like this. I have some people that are on here because of emails, and so I'm getting this, um, Warning: Some people have not been included in your shared circle. Only Google+ users can be shared. Which makes perfect sense. When you want to go and share it, you can include yourself in the shared circle by clicking that box. It will pop you into that top spot. Then you can share it to public or you can share it to a community. Obviously enough, I— well, maybe not obviously enough. I have a community. That is a gluten-free community where we discuss things. So I'm gonna put this group into this discussion under the introductions, wherever my introductions is. And the people in that community can now add all of those folks to their circles, giving them a focused target group to start to listen to. And once you put somebody in a circle, You can decide whether or not you want to keep them there. You have a 5,000 follower limit. That's as many people as you can follow. More people can follow you, but you're limited to 5,000. So make sure they're people you want to listen to, because after a certain point, you don't want to necessarily hear every detail from every share. So Does that all make sense for everybody? If not, hand me an idea of what you need to know.

The one thing you want to remember too is just because someone puts you in their circles doesn't necessarily mean that you have to circle them back.

In fact, most of the time you don't.

Yeah, a lot of times you don't. If they engage with you, like I get a lot of ads every day and I do try to go through them but if I don't know the person, if there's no relevant information about the person, if I look at their posts and I go, oh, I don't I don't want to see that in my stream. Okay, you don't have to follow them. That means that it's not harmful for them to follow you. Don't get worried that they're following you. And then, you know, if you ever do get someone who's trying to be, you know, that gets on your nerves, or this really, you just don't want to see them, or them seeing your posts, you can always block them at that point, and that'll, you know, stop them from seeing anything that you put out. But, you know, just Follow people that you find interesting and start looking in other directions. Again, we talk about this all the time, but you know, you have your blogging friends and they should be in that special circle. Like if you have 10 people that you want to always see their posts, put them in a circle that you can call up and you'll see their posts all the time. You won't miss anything. You can dial up the notifications on that so you're seeing more of what they post. Okay, but use these circles to your benefit so you can draw on them when you want to see. Most of the time I look at the whole stream, you know, but if I want to make sure I'm not missing my tech, I have a circle for tech people. If I want to make sure, you know, if I want to see something pretty to share and I haven't found anything, I have a circle of people that I draw on that I know are always consistently posting pretty food, you know, so I can get some food porn out there. So use them to how they make sense for you. How they make sense for me or how they make sense for Gene will not necessarily make sense for you. But have them make sense for you. Jean, did you show them how to dial down?

I didn't. I was hoping that people would have questions or two and I'm setting up the second screen share because it's a different way to get to it and I want to be able to show people how you get there.

Here's a message from Leah, "Till a couple of weeks ago I was sharing and spamming unknowingly. Jean Layton and Chef Dennis Littley showed me the light." Okay, thank you, I'm glad. And what she's talking about is, and I still get them, people send us blog posts all the time. When you share, don't share to Circles unless it's specific for Circles. Only share to public. Don't share to both, share to public. Now if you've got a message or I like to call them like a life changes or something that happens that you really want everyone to know about. Maybe you're moving, you want everybody to know about. Maybe you just had a baby or you had a grandchild or something, you want everybody to know. That's okay, share that message, that's fine. But we don't need to know that you posted, you had 3 new posts this week. Okay, that's fine, you know, but leave that information for public and hopefully we'll come across them, the people that are really interested will come across them. But yeah, don't, because that's kind of like spamming and you will get not blocked totally, you'll get muted. And that means when you do post something important, I may not see it because you're muted.

Yeah, keep in mind what you're sharing has to be relevant for the person following you, not for you, but for the person following you. So if it's a blog post about the best gluten-free cupcake you've ever made, that's a great post to put into a community, a gluten-free community where there's a baking recipe exchange. Perfect place for it. But if you personally share that to me, I'll probably, if I'm in a generous day and have 5 minutes, shoot you back an email or a message that says, "This is more appropriately shared publicly." If you keep doing it, I can guarantee you I'll block you because I don't have the time to watch those things go by on my stream. Especially once you get about, well, whatever number of followers, you find yourself with no time and you have to sift. I actually maintain a circle of people who I want to keep following but I don't want to hear from all the time. You can do that. Which is really neat. You can set up a circle and have it set to no notifications.

Mark Traphagen actually has something set up for him and he sets up a circle that he wants to hear everything and get notifications from people. Then he has one that he just wants to hear a little bit from and one that he wants to hear less from and he builds some circles that way too. So it's all what works for you.

Yeah, and in the post I have a series of contacts and other people's opinions about setting up circles in the bottom of my post, and they're all live links. So go there and, you know, I know Mark is in there, I know Shannon Hernandez is in there, I know Mike Alton is in there. They're people who I've listened to for months, years, and Everybody has their own way of setting up their filing system, and that's what this is. This is your filing system, so set it up so it's appropriate for you. We have a question here.

Yeah, from Sarah Lamoth. I have a question I've been wondering about. What's the difference between blocking, muting, and removing from Circles?

Okay, so blocking means I don't want to see anything from this person ever again. Muting means I really don't want to listen to them, but I'm not taking them out of my circles of people. I use mute whenever I start to see the posts that happen for people later in the evening when obviously they've been imbibing. There's that set of posts that seem to appear at that point. I'll mute those because I don't want them in my stream. But when the person's not under the influence, they're an interesting person, so I'll leave them. Okay, so you mute by a particular one. And removing from circles means I don't want to follow you anymore. You can be in my stream if you're related to me through another person that I have circled, in other words, an extended circle, but I don't need to see what you're saying. Michael Mason is saying, I personally check the hovercards of all those that follow me and use that to decide which circle to place them in. That's a great criteria. I tend to follow— check the hovercards, and for me, I've gotten to a point where if someone's hovercard is still a default picture, in other words, they haven't changed it off of that rainbow color, if they don't have all of their hovercard information filled in, like I don't know where they live or I don't know where they work, I tend not to refollow those people. Admittedly, after a certain point you just can't refollow, you're limited to 5,000 so you have to be kind of selective.

Here's another question from Michael Mason, what's the limit of the number of people you can circle? You just said that, 5,000. The number of circles you can have is to my best knowledge unlimited. The number of circles an individual can be in is again unlimited.

Unlimited.

They only count as one person. If you have one person in 12 circles, it's not 12 people, it's one person.

That's why it's really great to get to know people on a granular level. In other words, if you know that somebody is a knitter, a twin mom, gluten-free— I'm using me because I don't want to shout out any of my friends and give away information they haven't given out. By all means, put them into a really simple circle set so that you are showing for yourself. If you need to go back, you know, if I need to find a twin mom who knits, I just go to the circles and I send it to them. How do you do the no notification thing? Okay, hang on, Kim, I'm going to do a screen share. And we'll get it up. No notifications. I've pulled up a circle I have of food and drink, and I went to home, and then up at the top you realize you have all your circles, right? So this is all of my circles, and I just arbitrarily picked food and drink. For me, this is a very general circle. This is everybody I've met in some way because they write about food. Notifications, you see this little bell is on or off. Whether or not I get any information from these people based on notification. Then the gear tells me I can show these posts in my home stream or not by unchecking. Then this is the best of all. How much do you want to see? Standard amount, more, or fewer? So on this one I leave it standard. I leave it posts in home stream. But please, I don't want to see a notification every time somebody in this group posts. So that's where I leave most of my notifications. I do have, just like Mark Trepagan, I have an all circle. And these are the people I want to know every time they post, and I show them in the home stream. And actually, I had this set to more. I don't know why I changed it.

They've been changed on their own, I think, a couple times.

Yeah, every now and then Google will decide it's time to change something and you have to go back and do it.

Just to see if you're paying attention.

Just to see if you're paying attention. And I have to admit, in this circle, for me This circle contains every Google person I know. Every Google person I've met on a Hangout. Every person that for whatever reason has helped me in any way. I want to know what they talk about. And Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick and Sheff and a few other people. But that's what it will do for me. And that's how you can save yourself brain space. Because if you set up your circles correctly, then you can dial it so that you only hear about your twin moms a little bit unless you want to follow that circle of posts. And you can always click over and see all those posts. There's no reason to have them notifying you every single time.

Here's another question from Phyllis. I have a client that has blog posts on the topics you're associated with. They have I have a circle of food bloggers and media. Are you saying not to post to that circle for good blog posts? Unless you've asked permission. I have friends that will say, is there anyone that would like to get every one of my posts? If not, tell me no. If you want them, say yes and I'll put you in a circle that wants to receive these notifications. If these people haven't agreed to receive them, don't send them to them.

Yeah, the idea is put everything into the public stream. And the other side of that is if you share only to an individual or to a community or to a circle, it limits the possibility of reshare. Because if you share to a community, then they get a— oh no, oh— warning notice when they try to share outside that community that it's been shared to a limited circle. So do yourself a favor, share everything publicly. And if there's some really relevant reason that Chef needs to hear about it or I need to hear about it, plus mention us. It's so much simpler to just ping us, you know, and then we'll see it. And if it's, you know, like today we both shared that this event was happening. We pinged each other so we knew that we were sharing to each other. The other side of it is we pinged certain people because they had asked us to. Then they got the notification and they could reshare it. Then we could go back and say, "Thanks for resharing it." It starts the whole conversation.

Another reason for posting to public and not for posting to circles and always posting to public is because You might post something really dynamic and a great picture and I want to reshare it. Now if you've only shared that to your circles, I can't reshare it because if I reshare it, I can only share it out to my extended circles, which means I'm sending them all notifications, so I won't do that. So you're cutting down your chances, number one, of being seen in the public stream by not sharing it to public, and then by having it reshared by sharing it limited. So you never want to share limited, you want to make sure it's always public, and that's the best way. And if it's good, you have to think of it in these terms, if it's If it's good content, it's going to get re-shared. The more times it's re-shared or commented on, it's going to pop back up to the top of the stream. So that's where you're going to get your traction from, okay, not from you sending it to specific circles. Here's a comment from Shannon for you: Excellent point, Gene Layton. Yes, you have to file your circles to what is comfortable or useful for you. For me, she has a circle of nothing but radio stations. All those radio stations don't have an active page. He set up to notify him when the circle comes alive. Then he also has circles specifically for news and different things that he gets throughout the day. And how you doing, Shannon? Thanks for being here.

Thanks, Shannon, for coming. Really appreciate it. And the other thing is, as everybody's shifting over from Facebook, for a fair number of us, we want to work with people, we want to work with particular brands or particular individuals. By all means, Set up a circle with those people you want to work with. I have a circle of brands and just like Shannon, there are people I want to work with but they're not live over here. Once they come live, they'll already be sitting in a circle. If they're not posting anything, I don't get notifications anyway. It's not like it's a big deal to set it up and just have it sitting there waiting. Yes, use hashtags in your post. Yes, yes.

Thanks for being here, Mick.

Not Instagram.

Yeah, I like to keep them down to 3 or 4. You know, after that it gets crazy. Michael Mason, you block people and mute posts, basically. No? Yes.

Yeah, I do.

Yeah, that's correct.

Yeah, you block the person so that they can't re-access you. And you mute the post so that your stream is still under your vision. I have to be honest, the only thing I mute, as soon as I start seeing naked people in my stream, it's inappropriate. And I don't allow alcohol in people's hands. I don't want to be the person who's got the drunk person on their thing.

Now you can also mute the person entirely too without blocking them.

Yeah.

So you can mute the person. And then here's a question from Nadia Stokes: How do you find people who might be interested in your posts?

Really good question. The first thing to do is figure out who wants your information. So you must have a keyword that you're posting with, or two or three. Punch those keywords into the search box and see who's talking about it. When you see who's talking about it, pop those people into a circle. Now when you share, you can do one of two things. You can ask that circle of people, "Would you like to get my posts?" Or you can put it to public, but because you followed a person, there's still a fair amount of people who are following back.. And you'll have made the connection that way. I have to be honest, anybody who's fairly new still thinks of Google+ like Facebook and they follow back people who follow them. And that's not bad, that'll give you your first followers and then you can figure out from there if you guys want to keep talking or not.

Yeah, you can always unfollow them later. It's not a bad thing to follow them initially if you think they might be interesting. But you can always unfollow.

Yes, Markham is unfollowed.

Kathy Chester.

How do you find other circles in your niche? Oh, you mean a shared circle? There are actually pages within Google+ that have curated shared circles, some of which are incredibly active and some of which are years old. It doesn't mean that the circles are bad, it just means that they haven't been curated recently. At the end of my post, I had a shared circle because I wanted to show people what it was. The circle I shared was my Gratitude Circle. In other words, these are the people who helped me in some way, shape, or form. They made a big difference in my ability to be here on Google+. I've shared my Gratitude Circle several times. It is an incredibly vetted circle. In other words, I know exactly who every person is in that circle and there's a reason in my head for them being there. That's the kind of circle you want to find. The hyperball circles that you see that are 500 people are sometimes helpful and most of the time just junk. They're people who are trying to build up a follower count. This isn't the place to worry about your follower count. The connections are what you want. Connections are what you want, not the follower count. The followers come, don't worry about it, they come.

And having 25 people who are good engagers in your circle and talk to you all the time will get you more traction than having 5,000 people that do not engage with you.

Yep.

And here's another part of Kathy's question, she's having an issue following people in her niche such as disability and health advocates.

Okay, so Kathy, what I would do is use that hashtag #disability, find out who's talking about disabilities, put them into a circle, put your information out to public, but ping the circle and say, "Are you interested in this?" You can do that once without getting annoying. Do it 19 times a week and you'll get blocked. It's just the way people are. And Mark, no, you're not a spammer.

No, we love you, Mark. And also, and Michelle, no, you're not a spammer. Not yet anyway, alright? So keep that in mind. And here's another one.

To be a spammer, you have to have a bad intent.

Yes.

You have to have the intent that you're here for the numbers, that you're not here to make connections You're just here to dump links and move people out to your blog. It takes intention to be a spammer, I think.

And just remember too, I remember someone telling me once, if you went to a party, you would not stand on a table and start yelling about something you had done. Okay, you're going to mingle, you're going to listen, you're going to engage with people, and then they're going to ask you, so what did you do today? Or what did you do yesterday? And then you can tell them all about what you did. Here's one from Kim. What about circle shares? How do you manage them?

Okay, here's what I do with a circle share, and I'm sure everybody has their own way of handling it. I put— I accept the circle, I add the people, I add the people, and once I add the people, I use the exact same name as the person who shared the circle, whatever the name was, and then I put the date. I boost the followers in that circle to all or more, just like I showed you, so that I'll see everything these people post for 3 days. In 3 days, if people have annoyed me, they're out of my circle. If they haven't annoyed me, I probably move them to a more relevant circle, and then I'll delete the whole circle after about an hour. Well, sometimes it's a week, sometimes it's 7 days. 2 weeks if it's a really, really quiet circle. But if you follow a circle put together by somebody who's engaging and engaged in conversation with that circle of people, you'll know. You'll know within a day or two because they're either going to be posting relevant things for you or they're not. So, you know, I'm kind of— I'm more than kind of. I am a techie person. I really like the back of house intricacies of getting things working. I have a mechanical mind and I like to see things working. I'll follow people that I don't necessarily understand because when they say something, it makes my brain open up to a new possibility. I follow a bunch of Google engineers. Do I understand coding? Absolutely not. But do they? And can they make me think about things differently? Yes. So I follow them.

And I follow people that explain to me what those people said because trying to even read it makes my head hurt. So I turn to people like Jean who can put it in layman's terms for me and say, "This is what you do." Okay, so that's the easiest thing to do for my part. And I'm easily distracted, so I'll follow people that go, "Ooh, pretty, pretty." So if they're pretty food porn or just great photography or something that I like, I'll follow them for a while and see what they do. Then if they just don't fit into the scheme of things later, I'll get rid of them. Here's James Braddock. Oh, you got one? Let me put yours up.

No, no, no, that's okay. If you've muted a person, will their posts still show up in your stream if they share to public? If you've muted a person? Their posts will not show up in your stream in any quantity. If you want to block them, then nothing will show up.

But if you mute them, you won't get notifications.

You won't get notifications. It's not quite the same. I only mute posts. I don't mute people. To me, if I don't want to hear what you're saying, I'm not going to let it stay nebulous. Does that make sense?

I do mute some people from time to time because they'll just keep sending the same post and then I'll go and unmute everyone and then it'll start all over again.

Yeah, and you can, you know, I go through stages where I'm very certain that I need to block people because I've been getting too much trash on my site and then, or on my stream, and then there are times when I'm feeling very warm and open and generous When I'm warm and open and generous, I'll let things slide.

We all have those days.

We all have those days. Shannon put up a neat one. There are a number of different strategies when it comes to having people follow your posts. I love how Jeanne and Dennis recommend you find people. When you start following these people, go on and provide quality responses to their posts and add value.. You can definitely build an organic following. That's the way to do it. Don't just say wonderful post. Read it first of all, read the post and then helpfully add to the conversation. That's how you'll get people to start following you back. Thanks Shannon.

Here's Leah, how do you know I wouldn't stand on the table? Leah, we're pretty sure you'd stand on the table.

I know you would. Stand on the table.

But I would enjoy seeing you stand on the table, so that's okay. There's people you want to stand on the table. Kathy Chester is back with another thing. She wants to know, are you saying you created that circle, but I want to find, say, people with disabilities or find people with MS, so how do I actually find them, or am I missing something? I need those connections.

Okay, so Kathy, I would point you towards communities. Because there are communities in Google for people with MS. There are communities for people with disabilities, and those are the places where people will be sharing very intently on a particular topic. So I would do the search in communities, and I would do the search in general for MS, for disabilities, for— I'm trying to think what other keywords you could use. I'm sure you have keywords you use. Punch through those keywords, join those communities, see if they're just link dump places because if they're just link dump places, you don't need to be there. You want conversation. Be a little bit broader though than just into MS. Go health advocacy because I know there's at least 3 different communities for health advocacy people. I'm in all of them. If you need to, Cathy, just ping me and we'll see if we can get 10 minutes together and we'll do a little conversation. Okay?

Here's another one from Biting Edge: Follower count is useless if they don't engage. How very true is that?

Yes, exactly. So we've done what we promised ourselves we wouldn't do. We've gone overtime.

Yes, we have. We've been trying to cut it close, but I think we're doing pretty good. It's starting to get a little It's starting to quiet down.

So everybody who's watching, one thing, we do go back in the comments after the event and we do answer these questions so they do show up all the way around. So if we didn't have a chance to answer it, we will.

Or if you're watching this recorded, put your questions in. And just make sure if you do put a question to ping one of us so we know it was put on and that way we'll come back to it. And when I say ping—

put a in front of our names.

That's it, that's all it is, that's what we're saying.

Yeah, some of the terminology in Google+ is kind of fun. And yes, one of these days I'm going to create a dictionary but I haven't gotten there yet.

Excellent.

I love this one. It's a great way to divide and conquer. Give them a chance, then decide for yourself. I think that's pretty much what people do all the way around. You have to give them a chance to show their true colors and then disregard.

Here's one last one from Lori too. If you share to a community that is set for public, that shares to public and you don't have to reshare to public, correct? No, that's incorrect. No, it only shares to the members of that community.

It shares to that community. Public means that the community is findable. It's the difference between a private community on Facebook and a public community on Facebook. Same thing. It's not where the posts go, it's how do people find the community. So if you have a public community, it's only sharing within that community.

Now people that are just viewing that community, like if it's not a private community, it can be seen by others. But the most they can do is +1 it. They can't make any comments to it or share it.

If it's a public community, yes. If it's a public community, yes.

But then they can request to join, and a lot of communities will let everyone in. So, you know, that again is not a good place to be posting in if that's what it is, if it's not, you know, channeled in the direction you want to go in and they're specific.

And the other thing is, especially if you're coming over from Facebook, and you're joining a community set up here, make sure the rules are the same. Because I know there was a conversation in the Food Bloggers community and somebody thought that the community was private and it's not. It's public here. So be very careful what you're sharing and remember we're on the internet. If it's that private, think twice about posting it at all. It's all held in somebody's server somewhere.

And it's searchable too. Things you have posted on Google+ will show up in search. So it may be on the 12th page but it'll show up. You can check that for yourself sometimes on something you've posted.

Yeah. So thanks for coming everybody and next week we're talking about hovercards. And setting it up and making sure that your hovercard makes you look like somebody who's interested, involved, and engaged instead of just a newbie. We'll have more question time next week.

We should have a little bit of extra time. The hovercards won't take that long to go over, hopefully. We'll make some time for your questions. Again, leave your questions in the comment bar and we will get to them. Thanks so much for coming today.

Jeanne, thanks for coming.

Great job as always. We're going to help you get used to Google+ and we want it to be a happy place for you just like it is for us. Have a great time on Google+ and we'll see you all next week.

Bye.