It’s easy to get lots of shares and comments when you have thousands of followers, but what about if you have under 5,000 followers.
Here’s a look at some great Google+ pages with small followings but getting tons of engagement and will continue to grow:
Photoshop Disasters has under 4,000 followers at the moment, but each posts on average gets over 120+ shares and dozens of +1s and comments. This shows the power of an engaged picture-sharing community.
Many small businesses have created pages on Google+, but are having trouble understanding how to use it effectively.
These businesses are also having a lot of trouble networking and engaging their target audience.
So I thought it would fun to bring together some of the best Google+ coaches and strategists together to offer their advice to help a struggling business page with a free Google+ Page makeover.
Our Google+ A-Team will provide business strategies to help a struggling business page with their:
These strategies will be featured here on this blog so that other businesses can study and apply to their own page on Google+.
Here is a peek at some of the amazing people that will share their business expertise with us . . .
If you’re just starting a page in Google+, it can be a challenge to get followed (especially if nobody is looking for you). Unlike Twitter, you can’t just grow an audience on Google+ by following other people. You’re restricted from following people until they first follow you.
So how do you get noticed? And how can you promote yourself to your target market?
I shared 12 strategies to help you get your Google+ page circled in a recent blog post, and want to continue this series with 4 more ways to get noticed and circled:
I recently spoke at the SocialMediaExaminar.com Small Business Summit to share how I’m using Google+ for business. During the webinar, I discussed a variety of ways that businesses can begin finding their target market in Google+.
Here are some of the strategies that I shared in my presentation:
The first step is do a search for keywords related to your target audience. In this example, I’m looking to connect with ad agencies in Google+. I conducted searches for keywords like: digital agency, ad agency, advertising, marketing, etc. I found hundreds of pages related to this topic and started following these pages as a first step in networking with them. Since I can only follow other pages, I conducted my search within the “People and pages” drop-down and also looked for the “gray box” page icon to help me identify pages (since I’m unable to follow people with my page until first followed by them).
When first starting a Google+ page, it can feel lonely.
And I mean lonely.
Google doesn’t let you follow anyone, which means that nobody is subscribing to your page updates or even knows your page exists.
So how do you start getting circled? And more importantly, how do you start networking with your target audience on Google+?
Here are some page promotion tips to help you get started . . .
As a new page owner, I’m documenting all my page posts, shares, +1s, and daily circle counts in a Google Doc. I track everything because I want to know what’s helpful to the circled.us page community — and what’s not. And it’s my goal to share everything that I’m learning.
Last week, one of my page posts got +220 shares, and +1′d over seventy-five times over the course of a few days, which increased my circle count by over 500 people this last weekend. And it’s continuing to get shares now.
If you want to hurt your brand page and start getting uncircled fast, here are some killer ways to manage your Google+ page:
A great way to get uncircled is to just to link to yourself exclusively. Never share other people’s content. Never talk about anything other than your brand. Every post should be about what your company is doing.
As a new page owner, I’ve been studying hundreds of Google+ brand profiles to keep track of how pages engage people. I’ve also been studying everything from page photo strips to how brands are utilizing hangouts and seeking to circle subscribers.
Here is my growing list of optimization strategies I’m using on the Google+ circled.us page:
When people roll their mouse over your page icon when searching for pages, they will see your page name and the first 31 characters of your page tag line/description. Google’s tag line gets cut . . .
I read a few articles this last week arguing that it isn’t worth your time or energy to create a page for your business in Google Plus. I believe that now is the best time to start creating a page in Google+, and here are just a few reasons . . .
Google+ pages just started this month, and it’s exciting to see all the engagement from businesses and Google+ members already.
Google can make a lot more money by helping businesses market smarter on the web, and they can use Google+ pages to help businesses tie everything together.
The following are some predictions on how businesses will benefit by joining the Google+ ecosystem . . .
Google will make more money by getting more transactions in Google Checkout, and could easily integrate Google Checkout into Google+ pages to help businesses sell products or “Google Offers.” Businesses could then use sale data to group fans into customer circles based on interests and eventually re-market to again (within AdWords remarketing campaigns, Google+ Circle updates, and targeted AdWords ads based on audiences/circles). Imagine the possibilities.
It’s been fun to watch how different brands interact with fans on their new Google+ pages.
And since we just started the circled.us page, I started following hundreds of different pages to get ideas on how to make our page more fun, informative, and interactive.
Here is a consolidated list of engagement tactics that I’m noticing across popular pages:
This is just a preliminary list, and I will continually add to this page as I see more ways brands engage fans. Let me know of other engagement tactics here — and I’ll credit you for your contribution. 
Here are examples of these engagement tactics by brand . . .
