How To Get Followers On Google Plus

If you are a writer or other online business owner and haven’t joined Google+ yet I suggest you do. It is now open to everyone and no longer an invitation only site. I'm an early adopter and found it to be a great site for networking and increasing my website traffic. There is a huge potential for marketing.

When you post an article or other comment and hit the public button it can be seen by anyone on the internet interested in that subject not just your friends on Google+. Because Google owns this social networking site it also goes on their search feed increasing the number of people who see your work. That means more website traffic and a potential to increase Google pagerank.

Once you have joined Google your goal is to get as many followers as possible. More followers means a higher potential of readers or customers for your website.

How to get Google+ followers

It’s no guarantee that adding people will insure they add you but the more you have added and interacted with the higher the likelihood they will add you to their list of friends.

Find people you already know-

This probably sounds obvious but in the beginning this will be the easiest. Look for people you already have friended in other social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and any others.

If you can’t find people you know ask them if they use a different name or if they are even a member of Google+.

Follow people your friends follow

Google plus makes it easy to gather large amounts of people to follow at once. Go into any member’s friend circles, highlight them all and hit the follow button.

Unlike Facebook, there is no penalty for adding people you don't already know. Most of us are grown ups and if we don't want to be someone's friend all we have to do is hit the "Ignore" button.

Look for people you admire

They may be celebrities, authors, website owners, entrepreneurs, journalists or other important people you enjoy reading.

Many people in technology and who have an online presence are already on Google Plus realizing it’s marketing potential.

Once you’ve added these people you can then look for people in their friend circles for like-minded individuals you might enjoy meeting.

Add by subject matter

At the top of your page is a box that says, “Search Google+,” this will bring up any status reports on that subject by all Google+ members that have added a public update.

For instance if you are interested in what people are saying about a certain politician, celebrity, television show, movie or book. You can even search for things like a breed of dog, cats or activities like gardening or jet skiing.

Read the comments and add people who have similar ideas. You can also add the person who left the post.

Read and leave insightful comments

I’ve gotten many followers by writing remarks that other people liked as well as clicking on the Plus One button of their comments. If you put in “+” and a person’s name before you leave a note, that person will get a notification that someone responded to their post. After a while some will decide to be your friend based upon your having ideas in common.

Friend Circles

This is a great feature and can help if you want to only show pictures or posts to a certain group of people. You can name your circles anything you choose.

After you’ve gathered a collection of friends you can move them to relevant circles based on their occupation, interests, personalities, or just however you choose. You can even put people in more than one circle, for instance if a person is a writer but also into travel photography you could put them in both a Writer and a Photographer circle.

You don’t have to add everyone who adds you

You will only see news feeds from people you are following so if you no longer enjoy that person’s list you can unfollow them and you will no longer see their posts.

If someone adds you but you don’t have anything in common with them you can just hit the ignore button. They won’t get a nasty note from Google and they won't even know about it, so no harm done. Sometimes I get requests from people from another country and all of their posts are in another language I don’t speak. I don’t usually add them. If I can’t communicate with them or understand their updates it isn’t doing either of us any good.

Choose what you see

If you don’t want to unfollow someone but don’t want to see their comments all of the time you can put them in a group of other people you don’t want to see. If for instance you only want to read posts from “People Worth Listening To” then those you’ve added to that friend group will only show in your feed. You can highlight more than one group at a time. You can have an “Annoying People” group and leave them out of your stream, this way you aren’t seeing their comments but they don’t know about it. This is good for Uncle Dave who thinks he’s funny but really isn’t.

Clicking on your stream shows all current posts from anyone sharing with you or anything that is a public update by your friends.

Posting updates that do not annoy people

One thing I’ve noticed, when you leave an update and only choose a particular circle it pops up in their notification box. If you are a writer and want as much publicity as possible then you should post all story updates as “Public.” This won’t show up in people’s notification box but will run in their normal “Stream” keeping people from deleting you from their friend’s list. Clogging up notification boxes tends to upset some and you don’t want that.

We want to keep as many readers as possible and not being annoying is the best way.

Add me on Google Plus

Feel free to add me, and any of my friends once you’ve started a page on Google+. You’ll be glad you joined and will increase blog traffic as well as your HubPages traffic.

Hashtags

This works similar to Twitter. If you post a story or any information using hashtags or pound signs "#" will help the Google search bots. When people put in a search for your subject they'll find your article in the list giving you more readers.