Why eBid Sellers Need To Be On Google+ Now!
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Published on 21st January 2014 07:46 PM
Google+ although now the second largest social network, is also the most misunderstood, and least well-known.
Started in June 2011, it has now overtaken Twitter and LinkedIn in terms of daily active users and is miles ahead of all the competition in terms of features and importance.
Google+ is one of the most important social network for eBid sellers and businesses alike - and something that should be on your to-do list or face being left behind. In this Blog post I will explain about the history of Google+, why it is so important for sellers, and how to get the most out of it.
An Introduction to Google+
Google+ now IS Google! This isn’t just a phrase I use lightly, it's a fact and probably the biggest thing to happen to the internet world in years. On the 28th June 2011 Google+ was launched as an invitation only social network, early adopters clamoured to get invites to jump on board and so began the slow and steady rise of Google+. So high was the demand for these invites that Google+ Went public months earlier than planned.
What Google had created was not just a social network, but took all the best bits of the web and created a super network. Integrating seamlessly into all the other Google products like Gmail, Google Docs ( now Google Drive ), Google maps, YouTube, Google Places, Android and most importantly Google Search.
While Facebook's monthly active users continue to decline, Google+ has risen to 2nd place with over 359 million active users, and 1.01 Billion registered members. It is clear from the onset that Google's aim was to create one place for everything, and this has huge advantages in terms of SEO ( Search Engine Optimisation ) and marketing.
So What Can You Do On Google+?
Google+ allows you to post video, links, picture and text content just like you can on Facebook. Google+ however introduces the concept of ‘circles’, essentially allowing users to group followers according to interests or any other criteria they wish to assign, for example work colleagues, business contacts, or customers; which makes targeting your content far easier to achieve than it is on either Twitter or Facebook.
Google+ also benefits from the unique concept of ‘hangouts’, put simply these are either video or text chats that you can host or participate in with multiple people at the same time.
More recently Google+ has also introduced picture editing capabilities, allowing you to edit any of the pictures that you post on the network, super handy if you aren’t a graphic artist ( like me! ) or have knowledge of Photoshop or Gimp.
Google+ and SEO
Not only is the correlation for +1s higher than that for Facebook activity, but the Google+ platform has qualities that make it a far superior platform for SEO. These qualities suggest sharing content on Google+ has the potential to influence search rankings in significant ways.
Intentional or not, the engineers who made Google+ built for SEO. Consider the factors that make sharing content on Google+ far different from sharing on other social networks:
Posts are crawled and indexed almost immediately
One of the original goals for Google+ was using it to power real-time search after Twitter cut off Google’s access to its data in 2011. Since then, Google has been using Google+ to discover new content, and many web professionals have discovered that URLs shared on Google+ are crawled and indexed very quickly.
Compare this to Facebook, where because of privacy settings and restrictions on data sharing, it’s not uncommon for posts to never be crawled or indexed by Google at all.
Unlike Facebook, which hides data from Google, or Twitter, which directs Google not to follow most of its links, Google+ data is immediately and fully accessible to the company that built it.
So What Can Google+ Mean For eBid Sellers?
First thing you will need to do is create a Google account, if you use Gmail, YouTube, or are an Android user then you will already have one, if not you can easily make one in a few minutes.
Once you have done that you can create a Google+ profile, again this is a very easy process. The most important part is make sure you fill out as much as possible, think about it as your all about me page on eBid.
Then I advise you play about on it for a while, see its features, add people and pages to your circles, join the eBid community ( more on this later ), and generally explore its vast, easy to use features.
Next you should create a google+ Page for each of your stores, this is separate to your personal profile, and more of a business page that you can manage for your stores. This is where we will post our listings we have on eBid to.
eBid has introduced to the eBid listing pages, Google+ share buttons, you can use these to publish your listings direct to you pages with one click, or choose people for circles to share to as well, this is where circles are a great feature for sellers. you can have a circle for your friends, family, and a separate one for customers, or potential customers, this way you are not posting your listings to family and friends all the time and you can specify who sees what.
Join the eBid community as well as other communities that are relevant to your stores or targeted customers, for example, if you sell Star wars items, join the Star wars communities, if you sell knitting patterns, join the knitting communities. When you share a listing from eBid, you can post it directly to these communities and all the members will see your listing!
Also on the eBid Community page, get into practice of +1ing all of the other listings posted to it, the more +1s the more popular google sees this listing is, so it puts it higher up the search listings.
Summary
Be visual
People routinely respond better to post which include pictures or video than they do to plain text posts. Google+ tweaked the layout of pages in May 2013 leading to a layout that lends itself even better to visual imagery, so make the most of this!
Make the most of your profile
Make sure you have filled in all of your company details and that you are making use of the profile image and cover photo (which is massive!) as these will allow you to make a high impact and grab people's attention more effectively. Make sure you provide links not just to your stores but to your blog and all of your social network profiles.
Improve the images you post
Google has recently introduced the ability to edit images that you upload. This functionality is especially good for those who don’t have their own image editing software such as Photoshop or Gimp. The Google+ image editing function allows you to make various changes to your image including auto colour fixing, cropping and adding text.
Keep an eye out for more Google+ tips and tricks to follow soon.
Dean
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