6 Steps to an Award Winning Google+ Page
A Google+ Case Study: Silverback Social & The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society
We’re thrilled to announce that our work on behalf of one of our premier client partners, The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, was featured in Google’s “Google+ Best Practices for Nonprofits” guide, found here.
Google+ is a unique social network that is owned by the largest and most used search engine in the world Google (searchengineland). Because of this, it’s an absolute must to have a strong presence if you want SEO benefits. Luckily, it’s rather simple to gain a presence.
Here’s The Leukemia and Lymphoma Societies’ Google+ page before we started working on it:
Here’s The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society page now:
Here are five steps to make your Google+ page better:
1. Custom Header Image: The first step for us was to brand The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society page by creating a custom header photo rather than using the default image. The importance of a custom header is to give the user a snapshot of what the page is about without even having to read any of our posts or content. It also helps highlight the page’s legitimacy as The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
2. Post Constantly: In order to gain a following on Google+, it’s important to consistently post the right content. For The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, we post everyday, even on weekends, and sometimes twice a day. Frequent and consistent posts help spread our reach because our content will always be right in front of our audience, encouraging shares.
3. Post Relevant Content: The right content should be relevant to your brand or business. For LLS, we post content that is relevant to blood cancer. Here’s an example of a post we created for BCAM (blood cancer awareness month):
4.Diversify Your Posts: For the month of September, this was one of our most shared and +1’d posts. The image makes it easy to process, and the content is relevant to the time and audience. Another thing to mention is that we like to diversify our content to keep our page fresh and unique. So instead of posting captioned images all the time, we’ll throw in links to videos, articles, donation pages, etc.:
5.Tag Appropriate Content: Any posts on Google+ should be appropriately tagged and hashtagged:
Users, brands, and companies will get a notification anytime they are tagged in a post. When tagging +Loren Brill in the post above, we were looking to get her to see that she was tagged and then sharing it with her circles. The above post is hashtagged #LLS so that whenever a user happens to come across the hashtag, they’ll be able to see all of our posts. Proper hashtagging is especially important on Google+ now that you can search for #keywords on Google search (searchenginewatch).
6. Be Responsive: Just like other social platforms, it’s important to communicate and respond to followers’ comments and questions:
Consistent and timely engagement shows users that we’re listening and that our Google+ profile isn’t just for pushing our own content. This ensures that users remain followers rather than unfollowing due to lack to activity.
We execute a similar strategy for all of our clients on Google+ and we are able to increase our “following” number at a steady rate.
To view the “Best Practices for Nonprofits” guide, follow the link here: http://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/finalgoogleplus-fornonprofits.pdf
Have we missed anything? What tips and tricks can you offer that you’ve seen work on Google+? Comment below.
