WHY THE HELL SHOULD I PAY ATTENTION TO GOOGLE+?Paul Fabretti – Brazen PR

Dan Nolan – theEword

WHAT IS GOOGLE+ ?Google+ is Google’s attempt at a social network

Launched in June 2011 it had 10m users within 30 days

Post images, video, share content and play games – just like you would in Facebook

WHAT IS GOOGLE+ ?Top Countries:

1.USA: 31.49%2.India: 13.69%3.Brazil: 5.43%4.UK: 3.88%5.Canada: 2.46%6.Germany: 2.20%7.Indonesia: 1.82%8.Mexico: 1.77%9.Italy: 1.76%10.Spain: 1.70%

WHAT IS GOOGLE+ ?Earlier this year, it had a major refresh to integrate seamlessly with:

•gmail•contacts•youtube•images

WHAT IS GOOGLE+ ?There are now over 100 million users worldwide.

Despite a lot of criticism about the network, people don’t realise just how quickly Google + is growing.

It is forecast to hit 400 million users by the end of 2012.

VS

VS

5 years

4.5 years

8 months

WHAT DOES THE UK LOOK LIKE? There are 3.5 million

active users in the UK, with a strong, young male bias.

Top cities:

•London•Manchester•Glasgow•Edinburgh

The good news (if you’re looking for a date!) is that 35% of these people are single!

If you fancy your chances, 1.8% say “it’s complicated”…

WHAT CAN YOU DO?chat with friends

share your thoughts via statuses post links, video and images

see what your friends are up to

see what’s trending

WHAT CAN YOU DO?CIRCLES

Say “adios” to long, boring friend lists and “hola” to circles

You have a circle of friends in real life so why not online?

“Circling” friends revolutionised how we manage our growing friend lists

We can now keep friends in many different circles and only read what that circle posts – or only post/share content with a certain group of friends

WHAT CAN YOU DO?PLAY GAMES

In August 2011, Google introduced games into Google+

Angry Birds, Crime City, Edgeworld and 13 other titles appeared as embedded games within the platform

Integration of these meant that, exactly like apps in Facebook, your achievements and records could be shared with your circles

WHAT CAN YOU DO?PHOTO GALLERIES

Create photo galleries as you would in any social network and store them in the cloud (google’s servers)

Have the Google+ app installed and take a picture – and it gets sent to your gallery straight away

WHAT CAN YOU DO?HANGOUT

Hangouts are what many believe are Google +’s killer app

Hangouts allow you to video chat with several friends at once or, best of all, watch any video on Google+ and YouTube together with your friends

Hangouts are like Skype but in Google Plus

We all love Will.i.am on The Voice right? Imagine being able chat with him!

TOP BRANDS ON GOOGLE+ WHO’S DOING WELL?

FORD – on there nice and early. Strong use of imagery and frequent questions asking to generate +1’s

NIKE – Product previews, hangouts with brand ambassadors

GUARDIAN – really taking “Guardian comments” to a new level. Regular hangouts and extended interactions

THE BUSINESS CASE

EVERYBODY’S DOING IT - it is estimated that 61 of the Top 100 brands in the US are on Google+.

IT IS GROWING, QUICKLY – 100m in 8 months. 400m by 2012. Even with 3.5m in the UK, it is growing very, very fast.

CONSUMERS EXPECT - visits to Google+ hit an average of 5.1m before brand Pages arrived. The month following this update, the average was 6.8m daily visits

FIRST MOVER – there’s still a good chance you’d be first to move in your sector HANGOUTS – extend the reach of your brand like never before

oh, and I never mentioned that the SEO benefits…

THE BUSINESS CASE

THE SEO BENEFITS ARE

HUGE…so here’s Dan to explain why!

SEO 101

WHAT IS SEO? “The process of making changes to a website so that traffic from search engines increases.”

WHY BOTHER WITH SEO?

MOVING ON UP – Optimised websites appear higher up the search results

CONSUMER REACH – More than 1/3 of natural search users click the top result

MORE TRAFFIC – If you move from position #3 in Google to #1 you get a 300% increase in website visitors (if you move from #10 to #1 it’s 1500%!)

MORE SALES – Higher rankings means more visitors, which means more conversions

More conversions

Increased traffic

Improvedrankings

WHO GOES TO THE TOP?

THE SCIENCE BIT – Google uses algorithms to decide which websites should be positioned high up the search results

MIXED SIGNALS – The algorithms look at different ‘signals’, including quality of content and your inbound linking profile

SOCIAL – Never used to have an impact on SEO, the past 18 months have seen it becoming increasingly important

IT’S GOOD TO TALK – The social ‘signal’ most valued by search engines is the amount of discussion and sharing around a brand’s website/links

GOOGLE+ AND SEO

IT’S ABOUT DATA – Google uses its own network to compile social data on users, doesn’t have to rely on Facebook (like Bing does)

SPEAKING OF THOSE TWO – Because of its dominance in search, Google doesn’t have to directly ‘compete’ with Facebook. Why?

COMPELLING USP – One of the key benefits of Google+ is enhanced search performance for brands who use it properly/effectively

BASICALLY – Google has worked it so that if you do well on G+, you’ll have better SEO (and all of the benefits that go with that)

NEED A LEG UP? – Google+ basically gives you another route to attack page one of the search results

KEY FEATURES – There are three key ways in which Google+ can help boost SEO:

- PEOPLE AND PAGES

- PERSONAL SEARCH RESULTS

- +1 RECOMMENDATIONS

HOW GOOGLE+ CAN HELP

PEOPLE AND PAGES

PEOPLE AND PAGES

PERSONAL SEARCH RESULTS

PERSONAL SEARCH RESULTS

• Google’s answer to the Facebook ‘Like’ button

• It looks like this:

• Appears on

• Company websites• Search results • Google+ Pages

+1 Recommendations

• +1 recommendations that your customers make can be seen by all of their friends

• There are two key benefits to this:

• Improved clickthrough rate on page one

+1 RECOMMENDATIONS

• The second, more important, benefit is that +1’d sites appear higher up the search rankings

• Google search for ‘SEO Manchester’

• Results in positions #3, #5 and #10

• 30% of natural search space covered

• This gives brands who are smart with G+ a significant boost in natural search

+1 RECOMMENDATIONS

• Quantity: Google looks at number of shares, +1s etc

• SO – encourage shares (be obvious about it too)

• Create content and promotions that deserve attention

• Timing is also important

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

• Quality – Google looks at interaction around your social activity

• SO – encourage debate among your customers

• Ask questions, set interactive competitions

• Again, frequency is as valuable as quantity

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

IS IT ALL A BED OF ROSES?

SIZE – are there enough of your audience on there…yet?

TIME – circle curation takes time – you are basically doing a crm job to categorise your fans.

Posting to your Page has to be done manually – are the rewards there at the moment?

Most staff have Facebook/Twitter accounts – how many have Google+ ones? Training is required

HANGOUTS – can webcams alone do the job. Broadcast can be expensive.