How to Get Started With Google+ Pages for Business
Announced a couple of days ago, Google+ for Business Pages (henceforth G+BP) are now available. With the rollout, let’s look at a few key points:
1. You can’t circle individuals unless they circle you first. This is a nice change as a consumer, tough on the marketer – it prevents you from mindlessly spam circling the entire network.
2. G+BP Profiles are exactly like every other profile on Google+. Configure it appropriately, provide lots of data about your business, and bonus, you can stuff inbound links into your About section if you want to encourage some clickthrough. If you’ve got behaviors and practices working well for you personally, do more of the same with G+BP.
3. G+BP for local business are bound to your Google Places data. Make sure that’s appropriately configured first.
4. The G+BP is bound to one personal G+ account only. Before you just go off and create it, it’s important to think about who is going to own the business page. Once created, it currently cannot be transferred, delegated, or shared.
5. The G+BP isn’t unique. Businesses can have multiple pages, so your product manager, for example, could run a G+BP just for his or her product line, while someone else runs the corporate brand.
6. For smaller companies and brands, there is no verification process that certifies your G+BP as yours currently. This means that a competitor can in theory create an identical page to yours and there’s not much you can do about it except complain to Google.
Now, let’s talk about building up your G+BP. Here’s the bottom line: in order to keep the experience of Google+ sane for the consumer end user, businesses have a severely limited set of outreach tools. This is a good thing and a smart move by Google to keep misbehavior to a minimum.
One of the few outreach tools available to G+BP owners is the ability to promote your G+BP to the personal owner’s audience. Logically, pick the employee at your company that already has the largest following on Google+ and have them own and promote your G+BP to get your presence jump-started. From there, hit your standard new social network recipe card to build momentum.
What, you didn’t get that card in your social media cookbook? Okay, fine, here’s mine. Return it when you’re done and try not to get cole slaw all over it.
1. Put up all your content first. Have something of value out there, get all the basics in place like photos, etc.
2. Set up a short URL or redirect of some kind that’s memorable, because Google+ doesn’t allow for customized URLs. That will be easier for employees and evangelists to share. For example, I have cspenn.com/g for my page. For the company page, I set up whatcounts.com/gplus.
3. Link up your G+BP on your website using the Badge Maker so that you get the benefit of the rel=publisher tag and make yourself eligible for Google Direct Connect. If there’s going to be a true domain-name style land grab, it will be around Direct Connect, so don’t skip this step.
4. Ask your employee base to promote your G+BP to their networks. This is doubly easy if your employees are using Google+ for Apps, since you can just send an all-system email. If they’re already on Google+, they should circle the company page first.
5. Hit your mailing list! This should be a no-brainer, but it’s amazing how we overlook this part. To get your initial seed momentum going, hit your list.
6. Cross promote on all your other networks. Again, an oft-overlooked no-brainer.
With this short recipe card, you should be able to get off and running with your new Google+ for Business Page(s). Everything that happens after this is up to you.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
4 vital search strategies for social media marketers
Take a look at the following charts and graphs.
Popular social media expert:
Well known social media company:
Social media and marketing media outlet:
Notice something? All of the sites that strongly rely on social media (50% or more of their traffic) have gotten pantsed over the past year in terms of traffic. Why?
It’s gotten so noisy in social media that the predominant way most of us are going to be found and discovered these days en masse isn’t through social media. It’s going to be through search. In looking at these accounts, their search volume has gotten stagnant or has declined!
With that in mind, here’s a simple but not easy question: how carefully are your search and social activities tied together?
After all, search has changed dramatically in the past few years, and many people are using old rulesets in their heads when it comes to SEO. Let’s see how up to date you are:
How important is on-site optimization?
Once upon a time, keyword stuffing, bolding text, and precise link text on each page mattered a great deal. Those days are gone. Today, the few things left that matter are:
- Appropriately named page and post titles
- Awesome content that is shared
- Fresh content
- A regularly updated XML sitemap
Let’s be very clear about the demands being asked of you as a content producer: you must have awesome content, created frequently, shared often. This is a tall, tall demand, but if you want to be found, if you want to be shared, if you want to be known, you have to hit these goals. Awesome content that’s infrequent won’t win you the game any more – the freshness update penalizes you. Mediocre content or repurposed content won’t win you the game any more – the Panda updates penalize you for that. Content that isn’t shared penalizes you, thanks to social signals in rankings.
What matters in off-site optimization?
Once upon a time, building links as fast, furiously, and far as possible was the sole way to win the off-site optimization game. Nothing else mattered except links, links, links, and you could get them any way you could. Today, that game has changed, too. If you haven’t read the SEOMoz 2011 Ranking Factors study, you missed the boat:
- Relevance matters
- Pay to play is getting tougher
- Social sharing matters a great deal
- User behavior matters
- … all that said, more links are still generally better than fewer links
As a social media marketer, you have a great deal of opportunity to nail all of the criteria search engines consider important to a site showing up. If you’re cultivating a focused audience in social, getting them to do things that matter (share, link up, click on relevant search results, etc.) should be easier than the average marketer working with very little, but we’re not putting our resources together.
For example, the social media expert listed above has over 300 recent tweets, but only one of them references their site or a post they’ve written recently. I’m all for conversation and community, but throw yourself a bone every now and again, buddy. Your search viability is counting on it, and with as many fans/followers/friends as you have, getting powerful search signals out of the audience should be relatively trivial and would reverse that slow decline in your site’s traffic.
What should you be doing?
Here’s your recipe card, if you’re looking for the quick answer, the TL;DR:
1. You must create awesome content. Sorry. There’s no getting around this. If your content sucks, then you need to level up your content creation skills. Go read Content Rules by CC Chapman and Ann Handley if you need help on this front.
2. You must publish awesome content frequently. How often? Google is starting to report freshness results in hours and minutes, not days and weeks. Get a plugin like Editorial Calendar for WordPress to help keep you on track.
3. You must have a structurally sound website using XML sitemaps properly and doing title-based on-site SEO. Your content should be appropriately titled for words and phrases that other human beings might actually search for. Test out your blog titles or parts of titles in the Google Adwords keyword tool if it’s a really important post. You should be publishing content on a blog that has a syntactically correct RSS feed, ideally routed through Google’s Feedburner service.
4. You must get people to do things with your content. Share it, link to it, retweet it, post it on Google+, hit the +1 button – anything and everything you can do to demonstrate that other human beings find value in your content. That’s one of the reasons I switched my newsletter to weekly, to get more people back to my content, sharing it, and doing stuff with it.
Is this recipe card complete? No. There are plenty of little things that happen after this, but if you don’t get these 4 steps right, you’re totally hosed, so focus on them first. This is the foundation of what I do, and I think it’s working:
That’s not a boast. That’s an exhortation for you to go and do likewise. You have the recipe. You have the tools. Get to it.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Google Reader and the loss of serendipity
One of the most critical losses to the blog reading community with the rollout of the new Google Reader is the loss of its internal sharing, something that many of us came to rely on for serendipity. Why? Because in many cases, other people in our Google Reader network found new blogs, new items to share, new and interesting perspectives through what our friends shared. With Reader’s new changes pushing everything to G+, it’s mighty hard now to see what your friends thought was important in the blogs they read daily.
Let’s take a brief moment to talk about the power of serendipity. Serendipity is loosely defined as finding something that you did not expect to find, a happy accident, and a pleasant surprise. Serendipity is more than just an accident, however – it’s a related accident. Here’s a good example: when you’re at the library, browsing at the shelf, trying to find the book you were looking for, you notice that there’s a series of books on either side of it that are even better than what you’d come looking for. That’s serendipity. Another simple example: you go to a conference to hear a popular speaker and wind up standing at the lunch line right next to them. Serendipity is sort of an accidental upgrade of your circumstances.
That’s what made Google Reader such a powerful engine of serendipity. You weren’t just finding random blog posts on random things. You were finding things that other people who you followed for a reason were finding, and it was all related.
So what do you do if you still want your daily dose of serendipity? On the consuming side, you’ll want to check out the topical categories at sites like Topsy and Alltop. Both of these provide you with some level of discovery, some level of serendipity. I’ve started using the Alltop marketing feed in Flipboard as a way to randomly find related items, and it’s better than nothing.
On the publishing side, you’ve got a few options if you want to help encourage serendipity. On Twitter, I publish a feed every morning of the top 5 items that I thought were worth paying attention to called #the5. You can monitor this simply by searching for #the5 in Twitter search. I also publish a weekly newsletter that you can subscribe to which will round up and wrap up the week’s #the5 entries. You can also save and share items in Instapaper as well, and then permit Facebook, Twitter, or email followers to find your shared items that way.
Most of all? Share a blog you’re reading every week with your friends, by whatever your preferred sharing method is, but tell a friend about a blog you’re reading that you think they might not be (but should be). Your friends will get to know you, you’ll be fostering serendipity, and who knows? They might share something back that will change your morning reading list forever.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Do New Klout Scores Predict Influence?
One of the biggest hanging questions from my previous post on the algorithm change to Klout scores was: does the new Klout score do a better or worse job of predicting influence? Let’s attempt to answer that together today.
Before we begin, the disclosures and disclaimers. This set of tests was done with two datasets from my audience on Twitter. It’s a niche audience of folks largely focused on digital marketing, which means that it’s not representative of the general public. I also interact with my audience in peculiar ways, including using a variety of tools to do some funky automated stuff. Thus, my audience should not be interpreted to be representative of the general public and certainly not representative of your audience.
First things first. Let’s see if we can ascertain what the new Klout score uses as its basis for making influence decisions. In the past, Klout scores relied heavily on activity, meaning that if you tweeted a lot, you’d get a halfway decent score. I pulled a random sample of 2,516 Twitter IDs from my followers and grabbed their followers, following, tweets, and lists counts.
Second, the usual warning applies. Correlation is not causation!
Is there a correlation between followers and Klout score? Yes, a relatively weak one:
It’s weak enough that I wouldn’t rely on it, but not weak enough that it’s statistically insignificant.
How about the people you follow and Klout score?
Weaker than followers but still not insignificant.
What about being listed? After all, if someone puts you on a Twitter list, they must want to follow you in some sense.
Also weak, though stronger than following count.
Finally, what about being just flat out noisy?
Weak, but stronger than following and listed.
What does this tell us? No one factor is dominant in the new Klout algorithm, though if you had to pick something to focus on for activity, getting new followers is the best of a bad lot. There’s another possibility as well: Klout may be giving more weight to other social networks, which means that Twitter (which this data set is based off of) may have less impact on your influence score overall.
Now, let’s get to the meat of the question: do people with higher Klout scores do what I want them to do? That, after all, is the definition of influence, the ability to change an outcome or cause an action to be taken. As you know from many past posts, I use an open source package called TwapperKeeper to keep a log of all my tweets and mentions. I pulled out everyone who has ever retweeted me since I installed the software, which was about a year ago, and then did a count of how many times they’d retweeted me. After all, if I’m influential to you, chances are you’ll retweet me more than once over the span of a year, right? It also follows logically that if you retweet me, chances are you retweet other people too, which should in turn make you influential and as a result you should have a higher Klout score.
So, to answer the question whether a Klout score is an accurate predictor of whether you’ll do what I want you to do (in this case, retweet), let’s run the numbers:
Uh oh. It turns out that Klout score is a horrible predictor of whether someone will retweet me. The Pearson R score is so low that it effectively says there’s no relationship between the Klout score and the likelihood that you’ll retweet me frequently.
The bottom line is this: if you are using or want to use Klout scores to determine who to follow for the purposes of getting them to retweet you, Klout is a useless metric for this purpose, at least with my digital marketing crowd.
As always, I believe strongly in peer review, so I’m including the anonymized data sets for the information shown above so that you can run your own tests on it. I’m not a statistician by any stretch of the imagination, so I would encourage you to do your own study using my methodology or at least download my data sets and slice & dice ‘em for yourself.
Download the random sample of Klout scores vs. followers and other general measures in a CSV.
Download the people who retweeted me vs. Klout scores in a CSV.
What’s your take on this Klout data?
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Old Klout scores vs. New Klout scores
I’m a bit of a data packrat. My hard drive is littered with piles of spreadsheets, CSV files, MySQL databases, and more, which comes in handy more often than you’d think. When Klout announced a major change to their algorithm on October 26, 2011, I knew I had to take a look and see how scores had changed – but I had to do it in a statistically valid way. I strive to avoid producing “studies” and “social media science” that would be labeled cringeworthy by folks like Tom Webster.
Luckily, I had a pool of old Klout data with original Twitter IDs from July laying around, so I was able to do a longitudinal study of Klout scores for the same set of IDs over time. Let’s see what changed.
Data disclosure: this pool of approximately 5,000 Twitter IDs was originally randomly chosen from my Twitter followers. My audience tends to skew towards marketing professionals, so bear that in mind – this audience is not representative of all Twitter users.
Here’s the basic line chart for old Klout scores:
Here’s the basic line chart for new Klout scores:
Take note that scores declined nearly linearly once you were past the short head in the old model. In the new model, there’s a change in inflection right around 35 or so, and then again around 15. Also take note that in Old Klout, scores could be as low as 1; in New Klout, scores bottom out at 10.
The change in the floor score impacts the normal distribution of scores pretty significantly. Here’s Old Klout as a normal distribution:
You can see the pile of low level 1 scores at the very left. Now the same for New Klout:
The pile of level 1s are now piled up with the level 10s on the left side. For data quality purposes, this makes it VERY hard to distinguish between what’s a crap account (the old level 1s, which was a good indicator of bots) and brand new people to Twitter (usually the old level 10s). This is very unfortunate in itself.
Second, it almost looks like Klout tried to balance active, influential folks in around 45 on the new chart. To show you the best illustration of this, let’s filter out all scores below 11 on both data sets so that you can see people with at least some activity and/or influence.
Old Klout:
New Klout:
Two things leap out: If you were above 45 in Old Klout, it looks like you might have gotten a downgrade. Second, look at the low end – a lot more people moved from the second quartile to the left side in the algorithm change.
So with all of these changes, is there a “good” Klout score in the new model for my dataset? In the old model that was activity based, anything above 15 was probably not too bad – active users of Twitter. In the new model, 15 is one of the break points, but right around 35 is where you see scores really pick up for this sample set. If I were looking for “influencers” in the new scoring model, I might want to start looking at scores of 35 and up.
GREAT BIG HUGE WARNING: Remember that this is a biased, non-representative sample. I am most assuredly NOT saying that you should run out and update all your social media marketing Powerpoint slides with a shiny new “35 or bust” bullet point. What I am saying is that Klout now appears to have two tiers in their data – lower influence in the 11-15 range and higher influence in the 35-50 range.
Does that mean you’re a social media failure if you have a Klout score below 35? No. It could mean you’re not going to get access to as many of the perks in their perks program, but that’s about it for consequences of a score under 35 as far as I can tell. Beyond that, keep doing everything that is a generally accepted best practice on Twitter: share interesting stuff, have real conversations, be human, etc.
Do Klout scores matter? In the old model, they were based on activity and could be gamed fairly easily. I don’t have enough data for the new model yet (working on that) to see what aspects of social media practice correlate less or more strongly with the score, so there’s no way to tell if their algorithm is an improvement or not for the purposes of judging who is influential. That means for now, they’re not any less or more accurate than they were before the update, so put as little or as much faith in them as you did before until we have better data.
For those folks who are data junkies, you are welcome to download the anonymized CSV files for these two datasets here:
Download Old Klout csv.
Download New Klout csv.
I’d love to hear about your conclusions in the comments.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
How to Share Circles on Google+
Shared circles just became available for Google+. Here’s how they work.
First, go to your Circles tab and hover over any circle.
You’ll get the option to share the circle to your timeline. Give it some flavor text and hit the Share button. You’ll note that shared circles have a limit of 250 people.
Note something useful: you can restrict the sharing of circles as you would any other post. Thus, if you wanted to share a circle of influencers with your coworkers, for example, you can do so without the shared circle becoming public knowledge.
Here’s what folks will see in your timeline:
Clicking on it will let them add those people to their own circles.
What are some of the applications of this?
- People who are currently hiring: a nice idea for a shared circle of folks who have jobs posted. If they’re using Google+ to post those jobs, you’ll see them aggregated.
- Webinar co-presenters: doing a hangout or webinar? Create a circle of the panelists so that people can follow them.
- Conferences: got fewer than 250 attendees? Toss ‘em all in a shared circle and you have an instant ad-hoc group. (or break up a larger registration list into a couple of circles)
- Coworkers: get everyone in the company linked up by sharing your company list with your team.
One final thing to keep in mind: shared circles are effectively posts in your timeline, not persistent links like a Facebook Group. That means if you want to promote a circle, you should either bookmark your original share post or re-share your circle on a regular basis. Want some longevity on your circles? Consider putting a collection of them on your blog so they’re findable over the long term!
What will you be sharing from your collection of circles?
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Book Me to Speak
Got an event coming up? Learn why you should book me to speak!
• Download my 2012 speaking kit
•Book me to speak now!
Get Marketing White Belt
Grab my new book, Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer, and get better at marketing right now!
Blog Delivery
Things I recommend:
I recommend:
for Wordpress themes like this one.
I recommend:
for Twitter audience building.