Monday 11 January 2016

Why Google+ Will Be the Next Big Thing for Your Business

Why the hubbub about Google+? The last thing entrepreneurs need is another social network to join, right? Weren't you just getting the hang of Twitter? Didn't you just start putting that Facebook business page together? social media marketing conference So why is Brogan back here telling you to get into Google+, and pronto?I've never made a prediction like this before. I'm not exactly Mr. Bleeding Edge. But what I've seen so far is that the new social network from Google has a lot of advantages that are worth thinking about, and entrepreneurial types should take a look-see.While the company tirelessly negotiated with the record labels to bring the same success to U.S. soil, Spotify had already started making inroads with Americans -- giving influencers and celebs like Ashton Kutcher and Miley Cyrus a test drive.Though the product speaks for itself, it didn't hurt that techies at Mashable, Techcrunch and CNET helped spread the word to early adopters. Last December, even the much-respected music critic Bob Lefsetz listed "Spotify In The States" as his number one Christmas wish. Besides the labels finally giving in, this word-of-mouth mentality helped the service gain traction and ultimately launch in the U.S. this past July.With Mark Zuckerberg being a big fan of Spotify since its early days (co-founder Sean Parker is an investor), Facebook is now reportedly planning to launch its own music service at the F8 Develop Conference in San Francisco on Thursday. If it does, it could help third-party music services like Spotify tap into an even bigger audience of 750 million users.A few days after our launch we ran a campaign on Twitter to hand out invites to Spotify. effective social media marketing We asked users to follow our new @SpotifyUSA account and tweet with the hashtag iwantSpotify as part of their message. We gave the first 1,000 people who did that an invitation. This helped us grow our new U.S. Twitter presence, get new users and create buzz on Twitter all at the same time.
marketing with social media

What Makes It Different

First (and important) Facebook is not indexed by Google for search results, meaning that everything you do inside there stays inside there. Second, Facebook and LinkedIn both are set up for more of an "exclusive" model, social media as a marketing tool which means that you have to know someone to know something. That's why you see companies pushing so hard for "likes," and why you see people spam the LinkedIn Groups.Google+ is slowly rolling out their "for business" parts of the platform, but on the day I wrote this, I can tell you that even being on their system as an individual representing a company is a big opportunity. The traffic to ChrisBrogan.com has received a huge boost since linking the occasional post from Google+.Google+ is a social networking platform, but you can look at it a lot of different ways. You can say it's like Facebook, only cleaner. It's like Twitter, only more engaging. It has the potential to be a great collaboration and communication platform (you can isolate who sees information by sharing it with specific Circles, or groupings of people). In its earliest weeks of existence, it already was sending more traffic to my website than any other social networking platform.Also, realize that Google+ is indexed by the biggest search engine in the world, also known as Google. Other search engines like it, too. And it has a lot of integration points, such as Google Places (which shows you location information), and an incredible potential for integrating even more of Google's services over time.We promote pre-releases, unique content and competitions for premium users across social media to notify both existing paying users and non-paying users. social media marketing pricing This also helps to highlight the added benefits of Premium to our non-paying users. We've also built large followings on both Facebook (over 1.1 million likes) and Twitter (over 165,000 followers). We use them in similar fashions since they tend to reach different audiences. They both provide us with a platform to promote new artists and albums, talk about great new Spotify features and get valuable feedback to improve our product.

How It Will Help Your Business

Social networks are built to try and emulate real-world connectivity and information-sharing. On one hand, they're like a more interesting telephone. On the other hand, they're built to augment (not replace) cocktail parties, social media marketing blog chamber of commerce meetings and other places where people get to know each other (or at least used to). Google+ does this surprisingly well, for a few reasons.Picture displays on Google+ are prettier and getting more comments than Flickr.Google+ lets you share photos, videos, links and location data with everyone, or with your select Circles. Thus, when you find the good stuff that applies to your real estate friends, if you've grouped them into a Circle, you can send that information only to them. Other times, you can share with the general public to try and grow your audience.Simply put, it's important to take action on Google+ right now. I saw the benefits of this when I joined Twitter in October 2006. If you get in, get familiar, start growing connections and learn how to curate and share, you'll be ahead of the game. It's not usually my thing to make predictions, but I'm sticking with this one. Include social media in all your communications plans. It can often be just as powerful as a press release or official post and people appreciate the personal touch. And have fun with it.Be active, be honest and be true to your own tone of voice. Provide your fans with a steady stream of relevant information and content and make a personal connection that will keep them coming back for more. social media marketing experts TweetDeck allows users to add multiple accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, foursquare and more. TweetDeck calls itself "the airport control" of Twitter. It integrates with link-shortening services and allows users to see multiple feeds and mentions at once. TweetDeck is free to use.

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