Google+: Think content strategy not social media

So Google dip their toes in the social network waters and the ripples quickly sweep around the internet. Within a fortnight there are 10 million users. And that's despite an invitation-only launch. This explosive growth is faster than any other social network.

Must be good then? A real Facebook killer? Well the thing is… when you've already got hundreds of millions of people using your products it's a wee bit easier to get them to use another.

But I suspect the real reason is the underlying motive that folks believe it will be important for SEO in the future. This is Google after all.

Content strategy or can haz more lolcats?

Do people really need another social network? Not really. Google+ is being marketed as a content sharing platform: 'real-life sharing, rethought for the web'. Content marketing is how to drive real traffic to your site and boost SEO in the process. And Google+ looks like it's shaping up to an effective content sharing platform.

So what does it take to be an effective content sharing platform?

1. An audience

Because it's integrated with the Google network adoption of Google+ has started with a bang and is likely to grow to tens of millions of users. That means not only are there plenty of people to consume your content, but also the chances are high that the people you want to reach are on Google+.

2. 'Shareability'

The most effective marketing is word of mouth. Online this means getting people to share your content. The advantages are threefold:

1. Your content comes with an implied endorsement from the sharer.
2. Your content reaches people it otherwise wouldn't.
3. You're getting free marketing!

So it's vital that a content sharing platform makes it easy to actually share content. Google+ is built from the ground-up to do this. Despite a bit of a learning curve to get the most from it, sharing content is easy.

3. Targeting

One of the things about Facebook and Twitter is the inability to control who you share what with (other than on an individual-by-individual basis). Google+ Circles makes it easy to create contact groups for targeting different content to different people. Deceptively simple, but a powerful feature content marketers will love.

3. Push-and-pull

As long as you get the timing, content and audience right then 'pushing' your content (e.g. sharing with your circle) is effective. Better still? When someone 'pulls' your content (by seeking it out). That's where Google+ Sparks come in. Like a cross between a search engine and an RSS Feed, this is where users can find content to match their 'interests'.

5. SEO

Google uses plenty of 'signals' to rate the relevance and quality of content for determining where it should appear in SERPs. One basic tenet is that the greater the popularity, the better the ranking. Crudely put, the more links (from trusted and relevant places) the better for SEO.

With the social media boom, more and more of these links are on social media platforms. Makes sense… search engines want to serve up content that's related to what people are talking about. If you think of every inbound link as a 'vote', then so is a share.

Tweets and retweets have a positive effect on SEO and you can bet that Google would love to do the same for all those 'likes' that lie tucked-away in Facebook. But now Google+ will be generating all that 'social graph' data. How long before they use it to feed into their SEO algorithms?

Is Google+ for you?

Forget Hangouts and Huddles, they're great features for users… if you're a business or website owner it's the possibilities for effective content strategies that should get you signing up for Google+. A big audience, oodles of shareability, targeting like no other social network, push and pull, plus that inevitable SEO boost… Google+ is much more than virtual farms and embarrassing pictures of that drunken weekend in Prague.

Written by Jason John Mills