The New Social Google+

Thanks so much for having me, and I, I love doing these Hangouts with you guys. The whole face of Google+ is about real people connecting with real people. So organizations can do very well on Google+ if they get someone out there to represent themselves and be the face of that company. So people have to get to know that organization not just as an organization, but as a real person representing that organization. The pages in Google+ are very similar, uh, whether they're for personal or for brand use. You can tell what they are by how they're written. Brand pages will have, uh, an address usually that is hot, a link, and that's how you can tell they're a brand page as opposed to a personal page. Most organizations are using Google+ right now to interact with the public in a way of just letting themselves getting introduced to the public. There are some very good examples of organizations using Google+. One of my favorite examples of organizational use of Google+ and the most successful use of Google+ is probably Sarah Hill. Sarah started out just delivering her message about veterans, and you know, a very worthwhile cause. She has gotten over 2 million followers. The differences between Google+, Facebook, and Twitter are the fact that Google+ encourages you to be social. Google+ is putting the social back into social media. And some people don't see that or they disagree with that, but they haven't taken the time to really engage and get to know people on a broader level. So the differences you're gonna find is that people are a lot more giving on Google+. They share knowledge, they share time. On Twitter, you know, you can't really get a big message across because of the limitations on characters that you can use. And on Facebook, it just seems like you're more or less an anonymous person there. You're a brand. You don't really get that connection. You don't make that personalized connection that really encourages engagement. Hangouts on Google+ can be done a few different ways. You have a private Hangout where you can hang out with someone privately via a video call or just a chat. And you can hang out with someone publicly in what they call a Hangout on Air. And the beauty of Hangouts on Air are that they automatically make a YouTube video for you. So you're going live, and then the beauty of that is it's evergreen. People are gonna come back to it, it's gonna show up in search, so it's gonna live on forever. So for businesses, for organizations that want to get a message out, keep a message out, and help themselves in search, in terms of search, this is It's really an excellent tool. If I could tell you a secret to make you successful on Google+, there's really a very simple formula, and that is be yourself, engage as yourself. People do business with people because they like them. We can go almost anywhere for business, but when we make that human contact, that bond, we'll start to ask questions like, "What do you do?" Oh, you do? Like, I have a food blog and I tell people that. Oh, really? Do you have good recipes? Let me go look. So I don't throw that out there right away. We connect as people first, and then that takes our cause or what we're promoting to the next level very easily.