Google+ Hasn’t Soared, 5 Reasons You Still Need It

Managing social media can feel like you don’t have enough arms. In order to find the time, we see plenty of businesses reconsider if they should be investing in this social media platform or that social media platform. The ideal solution is to hire a professional who knows and understands your business goals. We recommend Brainjar Media’s Social Media Marketing. Even if you are managing your own social media marketing, you may ask yourself is Google+ worth it? Google+ has not achieved the success of Facebook or Twitter and nobody seems to be talking about it. This is actually true, but Google+ is still an important arrow in your marketing quiver. Below are four reasons provided by Kelly Shepsko, a Web & Social Media Specialist, plus one of our own.

5 Reasons You Need Google+

1) Your Google+ posts are indexed by the search engines

Google+ posts  get the upper hand in search results, because content on this platform is favored by its creator, Google! In addition, your Google+ content posts can be ranked on search engines as well, because each and every post has its own unique URL. Each Google+ post is crawled and indexed almost immediately—unlike Facebook, where it’s not uncommon for posts to not be indexed at all. 

2) The +1 button has more impact than likes or retweets

Contrary to likes and retweets, Google+’s +1 functionality takes your content much further when it comes to search engine rankings. For example, if one of your popular Google+ posts got several +1’s from your followers, this post is more likely to rank in search engines for whatever the topic and keywords included in your post may be. A +1’ed post results in a shared post on Google+, which creates a followed link back to the post—something we call link building. Now isn’t that cool?

3) Your social content is more valuable

You know how blogging is extremely beneficial for your website? The capabilities of your Google+ posts have actually been compared to almost that of a full-blown blog post! In addition to every single post having its own unique URL like blog entries do, the first 45-50 characters of the Google+ post appear in the title tags, giving you the chance to increase your SEO credit even further. Since this Google+ is also a recommended platform to write longer, in-depth and informative posts, you’ll be providing higher quality content to your audience to not only build your search engine rankings with keywords and title tags but to ramp up engagement as well. In fact—the overall average percentage of engagement rate on Google+ almost reaches that of Facebook—so you still have a wealth of opportunities for engaging with your prospects!

4) There are better opportunities when using hashtags

When you use hashtags on Twitter, users are able to search that specific platform to tune into the buzz around a specific keyword on that platform. When you use a hashtag on Google+, you’re opening up doors for your content to be discovered not only on Google+ but on the first page of search engine results as well. Try it out—if you type in #contentmarketing into Google search, you’ll notice that a dynamic stream of Google+ posts shows up on the right side of the page. This gives your business opportunities to be found on the first page of Google just through social media! In addition, Google+ will suggest trending hashtags that are related to your content, so you’ll automatically get advice on what other hashtags to use, allowing for maximum exposure of your content.

5) Another reason not added by Kelly Shepsko is that Google+ is integrated with Google Maps/Places

This is the best tool if you are a local company with a limited service area. If you are in Gresham, Oregon, you may not be concerned with reaching New York or Dallas, especially if someone is looking you up with a mobile device. Google+ will let them know that you are nearby.

Brainjar Media is a digital marketing agency specializing in website SEO services and content marketing for social media. We help your website get found through Search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing. We help you define your goals, we can find out what kind of SEO your competition is doing and we can do it better. Call us today at 503.492.6500 for a consultation.