Social Media for Politics

This is something I wrote several months ago for a candidate who was looking to make his campaign digitally social. It has more of a bullet points & notes feel to it than my normal writing does, but I like to break out of the mold sometimes. 😉

Image by Young Digital Labs

General Rules of Thumb

The most important thing about any social media is quality writing. I would bet on a good writer who had never touched a computer over any tech savvy person who barely got through Comp I. It’s just a new medium–all the good writing rules (remember your audience. Be interesting. Etc..) still apply.

Talk to people, not at them. It’s a conversation, not a commercial. This is why social media’s buzzwords are words like “engaging” “connecting” “conversation” “relationship” “sharing” and so on.

People are smarter than we give them credit for. One of the myths of SM is that it has to be short, that people won’t read longer statuses or notes. Not true. If it’s written well people will read it.

Ask whoever does your webpage to add “Share” buttons at the end of each webpage. I personally have liked the ‘Add This’ service. This enables anyone to share that webpage to any social network site. It’s easier than running out and finding individual buttons for Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, etc..

Which sites?

Everyone, and that’s only a slight exaggeration, is on Facebook. A page there is necessary.

A lot of tea party activism and networking is on Twitter. I personally do not care for Twitter (140 characters?! Guaranteed to shrink your brain and cause ADD!), but do a lot on it because that’s where the conservatives are (besides FB). With Hootsuite it’s easy to manage both FB & Twitter, so you might as well go with both. But please don’t link your accounts.

When you get to the point that you have commercials made, YouTube is a great place for them. And it’s easy from there to post them to FB & Twitter. If you have a good video editer (one of the many skills I lack, alas.) you can post nicely edited stump speeches and townhall and candidate forum highlights.

Beyond these three, all others are optional. There are other awesome sites—Google+, FourSquare, and Flickr being 3 of my favorites. But I haven’t found anyone on these sites who wasn’t on FB or Twitter. Go for the biggest bang for your buck, because that’s all you’ll have time for. Unless of course you hire Magic Bottle Marketing in which case I highly recommend adding Google+ to your social repertoire!

Embrace the Taboo: Pricing

Photo by Soham_Pablo

Money is a taboo in our culture. We’ve all been told, don’t ever be the first to bring up money in the hiring process. We say that there are three things not to be discussed in polite company, but money is possibly the worst. You really shouldn’t talk about money with your date either. So you definitely shouldn’t ask me how much Magic Bottle Marketing’s social media services is going to cost your business, right? WRONG!

I won’t try to explain why people think you shouldn’t talk about money, because I have no idea. I always want to see the figures up front. I can tell you why that is!

• Money is often the deciding factor. I can either work for that amount or I can’t. I have this much money to spend, so I can either afford it or I can’t. I am already doing two volunteer projects so I simply don’t have the time for a pro bono job. These are cut and dry decisions that rest on number. I would rather know that number sooner rather than later.
• It tells me a lot about who I am talking to. How much someone is asking for or willing to pay tells me how much they know about the market, the product in question, what type of project they’re doing, how serious and committed they are, etc, etc…
• It saves me and them a lot of time. If I don’t like what I find out in the above two bullet points I want to know that right away so I don’t waste anyone’s time discussing a project that will never be.

So how much does social media for local businesses from Magic Bottle Marketing cost?

My pricing is similar to a restaurant’s pricing–pick two sides and an entree for $10 set-up. Your choices are…

Sides

• LinkedIn company page
• Facebook business page
• Twitter

Entrees

• Google+ company page
• Pinterest

Appetizers

• FourSquare venue
• Google Places setup
• 1 Google Adwords campaign
• 1 Facebook ad campaign
• FourSquare special setup

Appetizers are a one-time only fee—$50 for each. Obviously, campaigns and specials can be purchased multiple times. Your first two sides are $100 each per month, but the third is just $50 per month. Entrees are $150 per month. You can get a combo dinner (two sides and an entree) for $300 per month.

What are you paying for?

You are mostly paying for content creation and expert knowledge of how each platform can be customized to your business and its goals. Thus, sites whose content requires more time and effort (Google+ and Pinterest) cost more. Services that are a one-time only creation (campaigns and specials) cost less.

Pricing is something I thought about for months before I even bought the domain magicbottlemarketing.com. After surveying the local industry, I decided that my market niche would be affordable, customized content creation for social media for businesses. That niche was empty. Most businesses right here in Claremore either have no social media presence at all, are struggling to manage it on their own, or are being overcharged for setup only, content poor, non-customized social media accounts. And none of my competitors list their pricing up front.

You have better options! Please drop me a line at anna@magicbottlemarketing.com or give me a ring on my cell at 918-933-2303 and let’s get your business on the path to social success that’s affordable!

Antisocial Type?

Comic by Toothpaste for Dinner

This blog was prompted by three different conversations I had with local business owners today. All together they swirled into this question.

Are there businesses that SHOULDN’T use social media?

Short answer: no! Social media is flexible and can be adopted to any business need!

Personal answer: I personally wouldn’t contract with any company that isn’t safe for children or any doctor’s office. There are too many legal pitfalls in those two industries for them to be worth the risk with my limited legal knowledge.

So why do some business owners think their business wouldn’t benefit from social media? Here’s 5 misconceptions about social media that makes them think this.

1. Social media is only teens.

Where I run into this misconception most is in churches.  I approach them saying “Social media is simply a digitization of what you’re already doing with your members and community. It’s just another communication tool.” and they forward me to the youth pastor. Hello? Did you hear what I just said? Churches aren’t the only ones tainted with this heresy. It’s amusing to me to have people with a question about social media turn to me automatically not knowing that the middle-aged people standing around with me have smarter phones and more experience than I with anything technological or social.

What’s the truth? How about these stats? The average age of a social networker is 37. On Twitter and Facebook, minors are less than 15% of the sites’ users.

2. Social media is only women.

This perception is harder to pick up on. It shows up mor ein conversations and assumptions. I see it when people are surprised when my male marketing colleagues do more than SEO or when an automotive repair businessman tells me that hair saloons would benefit more from social media than his store. I’ve heard the term “chatty Cathy” applied to the social media profession.

How does this assumption hold up? Well, all of the major social networks do have more women than men users, but only slightly. It’s not more than 10% gap on Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn leans more toward men. Pinterest stands out in that it has the largest gender gap, heavily favoring the ladies. However,  not even that site is devoid of men!

3. Social media is only geeks.

So I should only use it if I’m selling comic collectibles or app development, right? Wrong! Who is the most followed person Google+? +Britney Spears. Is that geek behavior? Please, don’t insult us!

4. Social media is only Facebook, which we all hate.

I know I talk about Facebook a lot on this blog. That’s because that’s where most of my clients’ customers are. However, I’m not recommending a Facebook diet to anyone! And I know anytime anything changes the slightest bit on Facebook your stream fills up with wailing and weeping. It’s hard to take it seriously though when no one leaves. They can’t possibly all hate it as much as they say.

Let’s assume for a moment that you just cannot stand the idea of your business being on Facebook or you have been granted the divine insight needed to know that Facebook would not help your business in the slightest. You still have Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr, and WordPress to pick from!

5. Social media is only procrastination.

Sounds like a personal problem to me. 😉

If anything this misconception is just another reason to hire Magic Bottle Marketing. If social media is distracting to you and decreases your productivity, let me do it for you!

Refining Your Message

Communicating a message effectively is both an art and science. What do art and science have in common? They both take a lot of repetition to perfect and they both progress faster with feedback! Tuesday, I edited my ‘About‘ and ‘Services‘ pages. I’m CCing it here so I can get your feedback through comments.

About

Magic Bottle Marketing provides social media management and consulting services for local Green Country businesses. Social media is like a magic bottle that conveys your message to your customers faster, cheaper, and more effectively than traditional means. It combines three types of sales leads–advertising, returning  customers, and referals—into one powerful medium.

Anna Bavido founded Magic Bottle Marketing in 2011 out of a passion for her community and her own social media addictions, errr… experience. She has lived in Claremore since 2001 and graduated from Rogers State University in 2009 with a bachelor’s of science in social sciences. When she’s not teaching businesses to be sociable she is invovled in politics, family, karate, social media, and Jesus–but not necessarily in that order. Her favorite social network is Google+.

Services

Magic Bottle Marketing approaches each client every day with 3 mottos.

1. Give the client the biggest bang for their buck.
2. The right tool for the right job.
3. Track performance.

The first one is an attitude of gratefulness and responsibility for clients. You don’t have to give me business and I take the fact that you did very seriously. For more explanation, see Corporate Gratitude. Second, is a messaging approach that leverages the right social networks in the right way for clients’ goals and targeted customers. This is further explained in Social Media and Angry Birds. Third, I look back as often as I look forward. If I don’t know what I did before and how well it worked, I won’t know what to do next. I blogged about this some in the post Reflections.

With this mindset, I provide tiered contract management services for the following social media platforms–

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Foursquare
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Google Adwords
• WordPress

Service packages are customized to each client and start as low as $200/month. Discounts are available for churches, charities, and other nonprofits. Call Anna at 918-933-2303 or drop her a line at anna@magicbottlemarketing.com to find out how Magic Bottle Marketing can best help your business!

The 3 Musketeers of Facebook

Photo by StonySteiner

Saturday I was my political alter ego, but social media followed me even there. Although it wasn’t why I was there I ended up sitting in on a training for political activists and one of the sessions was about using Facebook for small, local political clubs. I was tickled to see social media being promoted, but the presentation was vague on specifics. When I had the chance to grab the microphone for a brief moment I tried to explain the difference between Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages. This post is a continuation of that thought and what I’ll be sending to folks who asked for more information Saturday.

I break Facebook down into 3 types. Let’s call them the 3 Musketeers! Profiles, Groups, and Pages. Just like with Angry Birds, each have a unique set of tools and uses. I’ll give a short description of each and then talk about best practices for business.

Profiles

Profiles belong to people. It should have a real first name and a real last name. How do you know you’re looking at a profile? Look for the ‘Add friend’ button or a link that says ‘See Friendship’. Another hint is whether Facebook refers to them by their first name. If anyone other than a real person has one it’s open to suspension or deletion by Facebook.

Business Uses for Profiles

Feel free to talk about your business in your statuses, but I wouldn’t advise using your profile for business promotion. Facebook has tailored everything about profiles to be personable and people expect to see personal stories on a profile. I’ll stop there before I get all carried away about sharing options and psychological consequences of a compartmental life. 🙂

Groups

Groups are exactly what they sound like–they’re a group of personal Facebook users who have a common interest. They basically provide a private wall that multiple people can post to. You can either join an open group or be added to a closed group by a member.  Anyone can create a group. No one speaks as or for the group. Every post in the group is from an individual member, so it definitely has to be a group effort (har, har).

Business Uses for Profiles

When it’s important to hear from individuals on a specific topic Groups are the ticket! Do you have a new product that you need feedback on? Ask your first 100 buyers (probably early adopters) to join your group and update you on their experiences with it! Do you need a quick way to communicate with employees who have forgotten to check their email? Make a private group, just be sure to drop members when they move onto a different job. Nonprofits can use a Page (coming up next!) to speak to the public and then a private group for all the logistics of volunteer shifts and supports. A particularly useful feature of Groups for volunteers is the ability to create and share documents. I still prefer Google Docs but some folks aren’t as familiar with it as Facebook.

Pages

Pages are profiles for businesses, bands, celebrities, and organizations. They have many of the same tools and apps as personal profiles (photos, statuses, notes, ability to like other pages, ask questions, etcetera), but have extra features such as the ability to run ads, track activity with Insights, and have custom tabs.

Business Uses for Pages

Everything. Pages are the #1 Facebook tool for businesses. Click on the Facebook tag at the bottom of this post and browse. And look for more to come!

Dreaming Social

Three of my family members are looking at some new business ventures. One of them is even under construction as we speak! Being the social media addict that I am, I’m already dreaming up ways that internet technology and social media can be of assistance to their efforts. I very much want this blog to be practical and hands-on. Blogs extolling the virtues of social media are a dime-a-dozen, after all. So, here are some futuristic case studies, if such a phrase is legitimate. 😉

Business Scenario #1: Taco Stand

My uncle, Fred Sutherland, is in the last stages of being released from the Texas State Prison System on parole. It’s a scary economic world for us all right now, but ex-cons have a much worse time of it than the rest of us do. A long story short is that he has a business plan ready to implement for several food wagons (he’s currently looking at tacos and burgers). He wants to target the downtown professional on lunch break, the construction crews that do not have their own transportation while on site. The plan is to be able to hit two or three key locations in a day at their specific lunch/supper rush.

Possible Social Media/Technology for Business Scenario #1

FourSquare: I’m recommending to Fred that he create a FourSquare account for each food wagon. I would like to see original quirky names. Each FourSquare account would build a strong local network of friends for each of its stops. Through push notifications and ‘Nearby’ features a lot of the daily promotional work will be ‘outsourced’ to FourSquare. Bonus: when a new location or stop is added for a wagon Fred can use Forecast (posted about previously) to plan an opening splash.

Text Club: The most obvious use of a texting group is to broadcast specials and locations, but you could do a lot beyond that. Customers could text orders and then receive a text when the order is ready. Which brings us to…

Payment: Square. The vendor pricing is quite competitive with traditional card payment methods. And you can’t beat the wow factor. 😉

It’s going to take my superior communication skills to present this to Fred. Social media wasn’t even thought of when he was last in the business world. I’ll let y’all know how it goes!

Business Scenario #2: Compressed Natural Gas (CNG)

My brother’s father-in-law (what do I call him? Father-in-law once removed? 2nd Father-in-law?), Bob Kulp, is a seasoned business owner and entrepreneur (It runs deep in his family) and his latest project is the conversion of traditional gasoline vehicles so that they run off of natural gas, which is significantly cleaner and cheaper than gasoline. He is in the process of building a CNG filling station on his property. He is avidly promoting CNG  and fleet conversion across Wisconsin.

Possible Social Media/Technology for Business Scenario #2

App: the best sales pitch is to show someone the money and I find the easiest way to track money is through an app. A CNG app could track

• mileage of CNG vehicle and how much less pollution it exhausts
• how much saved per gas purchase compared to gasoline prices in the area
• how close you are to paying off conversion cost with lower fuel costs and better gas mileage. Once conversion is paid for this converts to a pure savings number.
• how close you are to a CNG filling station

Each of these tracking should allow for sharing the positive numbers to social networks. “Aliya has saved $326 so far with Kulp Energy Solutions!” followed by a link.

Bob is already quite active on social networks, both personally and professionally, so just go observe and learn.

Business Scenario #3: Local Sports Scene

My brother Ethan has noticed that there is one sport that gets a lot of attention nationally that has a local scene in the Tulsa area who is ignored by all local media. I can’t tell you which one because you might capitalize on this idea before he gets to. ::glare:: don’t even think about it!

Possible Social Media/Technology for Business Scenario #3

He is first going to build an online reputation of an expert in the sport. Once that is established he wants to leverage it to get radio spots. All of this is a little hazy because some of it requires equipment investments that he does not currently have the money for. Any angel investors out there?

Twitter: He should live-tweet national events in this sport. He should also host a weekly TweetChat (which I described to him as a “twat on Chitter’ just the other day. How embarrassing.) on the sport.

Google+: He should do hangouts from local events and do hangout interviews with the athletes on Google+. He could also broadcast hangouts from the teams’ gyms with multiple interviews.

Blog: Predictions, commentary, reviews, interviews, etc.. of each local event.

Podcast: live broadcasting from local events that are also being broadcasted on television (which might restrict Hangouts). This will be the easiest part to convert to radio.

Many of these require portable wifi or 4G internet, a laptop or tablet with a good web camera, an external mic (maybe 2?), and access to cable television. With that high financial threshold this venture might take some time to happen, but I’m confident Ethan can make it a success!

Facebook Insights

Few things delight my nerdy little soul as much as a graph of a useful metric over time.  I prefer line graphs, but a pie chart can be fun, too. Graphs are definitely the strong point of Facebook’s Insights for Pages. I think even the Cinderella story benefits from some graphs, this one courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut.

What Facebook Insights could benefit from however is some clearer terms.  Here are some I find the most confusing. Hopefully, my explanations help.

People Talking About This

This is a plain and simple interaction metric. It is a sum of unique users who liked, commented, or shared your post. The fun thing about this number is that it displays itself to all your page visitors right under your tabs list on the left.

Virality

First off, does anyone know how to pronounce this?

This percentage metric tells you how many people interacted with your post (liked, shared, or commented) out of how many people saw your post (either directly or through their friends.) In other words, it takes the number for ‘People Talking About This’ and divides it by the ‘Reach’ number.

Story

At first the term seems to imply that it’s a post from either you or one of your fans, but it’s not. A story is generated whenever someone interacts with your post in anyway. You can think of as what would show up in the ticker feed. As we said above, it’s also the ‘People Talking About This’ metric.

One term I was not able to get a handle on was the metric ‘Engaged Users’. Facebook says it’s a frequency of clicks on your story. This is more than just story generations, but definitely less than ‘Reach’. The interesting tidbit I found by clicking on individual posts’ ‘Engaged Users’ numbers is the number of people who have given negative feedback, usually a hiding of the post. This still left questions though because the ‘Engaged Users’ count was still higher than the sum of the negative feedback number plus ‘People Talking About This’ number.

Before I go onto which metrics I watch carefully and do happy dances over, listen to Don McMillan’s comedy sketch about Power Points. His commentary on graphs is gold. “Power Points caused the mortgage meltdown!”

The power of social media are relationships and the conversations that drive them. Therefore, I value the ‘People Talking About This’ metric, even though it’s a mouthful to say. You can get a quick idea of this from the Insights Dashboard (what you see when you first click on Insights), but you really should go its own individual graphs. There you can see…

• Demographics of people who interact with you. On Cole Butler for Sheriff‘s page I found out that even though the gender split for likes of the page is 64% female and 34% male (where’s my other 2%?), interactions are done by 58% female and 40% male. So, even though Cole has more female likes than male likes (possibly because Facebook has more female users), the males are more likely to interact.
• Side-by-side comparisons of interactions and the viral reach those interactions provided. This gives you an idea of how deeply you reach into interactive fans’ networks and how influential your fans are. I wish there was a way to overlay these two graphs.

There will be more posts about this topic, I”m sure. We haven’t talked about Edge Rank yet! Stay tuned!

Exploring Settings

An occupational therapist who had worked as a freelancer specializing in corporate consulting once told me that the phrase she heard the most was “It adjusts?!” in a tone of incredulous surprise. She was a workmen’s comp and disability prevention strategy. CEOs would have her in to improve the working conditions for their employees expecting to be told to buy all new, customized office chairs with ergonomic keyboards and lattes attached. However, most of the time what the employees had was more than adequate if they had only explored its full range of features. In other words, she taught a lot of people how to change the height of their chair.

To turn occupational therapy into social media let me ask you

Have you explored every settings tab in every service you use?

I’m not going to walk you through every settings ever. Instead let’s focus on notifications on social media and how knowing a full-range of features can improve your experience.

A brother who shall remain anonymous missed an important email from me simply because he wasn’t checking his email, a confession pulled from him with many questions. With further probing I found out that he found his email overwhelming because there were so many notifications from Facebook. He didn’t know he even could change his notification settings. He basically said ‘It adjusts?!’

Did you know you could change notification settings for

• specific apps
• certain games
• select groups
• prioritize notifications from friends
• Receive notifications via email or text
• Have different settings on the web than in your mobile app

I’m not sure where I should put the question mark for the above list. How about here?

Also, let’s insert a funny comic about how social media constantly abuses our egos.

Ouch

Here’s some basic road map directions if any of the above bullets were a mystery to you.

From any page on Facebook click the drop down menu on ‘Account’ in the top right corner. 3rd link is ‘Account settings’. Stare at the ‘General Account Settings’ page that it brought you to for a bit and see if you recognize anything. Then remember that’s not what you came for and click on ‘Notifications’, the 3rd link in the left hand menu. Scroll past ‘Recent notifications’ to ‘All Notifications’. Click on a feature/application to expand what kind of notifications it sends you and edit to your heart’s content. Remember that even if you don’t receive an email notification you will still be notified of that action when you log into Facebook. In other words, your little red number will still count notifications the same.

My brother is just a personal user of social media. For business users I recommend a two-step approach to notifications.

1. Receive email notifications about everything on every platform you use.
2. Explore Gmail settings.

You don’t use Gmail? What’s wrong with you? You’ll get your own blog post later.

I'll show you!

I use notifications as record keeping. It’s a more constant service which makes it way better than trying to keep track of backing up all of my different social platforms who are all different pages when it comes to takeout options, server storage times, and rate-of-change of settings. Record keeping for you may not be as important as it is for someone like me who does it as a business, but it can’ t hurt.

So, how do I not drown in email every day? I use three Gmail tools–filters, search, and priority inbox.

Search is what first sold me on Gmail way back when I had a funky anonymous email handle like ‘TexasBlondie’. If you’re on the phone with Larry and need to refer your email conversations with him, don’t try to sift through your social media notifications to find it! That would be like hollering for someone in the crowded stadium instead of just calling their cell. Search for his email or the subject line!

Filters are way to have your email presorted and labelled. Open any notification email and on the right hand side click the magical drop down menu button ‘More’ (what an exciting word! More!) and click ‘Filter emails like this’. I won’t walk you through every step as Gmail is user-friendly, but I will give two tips. For notifications, check the box ‘Never mark as important’.  Also remember that notifications come from weird email addresses so using your ‘subject line’ and ‘contains the words’ options will probably be more effective.

Finally, train your priority inbox.

We hope it's a nice learning robot, not like Omnidroid

Priority inbox is customized to each user. If you don’t teach it as you go it won’t be useful to you. Filters are the best for teaching it big principles–never mark Facebook as important, always put sweethubby@gmail.com in priority box, etc.. For small tweaks use the yellow plus and minus signs inside each email. Kristen Lemons has a great explanation of this.

One last piece of advice. Before diving into setting set up emergency protocols. Have a friend come check on you in a few hours. Always tell someone you’re going in! Users have been known to get lost and never come back out! Of course, the more knowledgeable you are of settings the less dangerous it is. So stay updated!

 

3-in-1 Package

Today’s post is my ever-evolving sales pitch. In person it is of course much shorter. Consider this back story. 😉

Sales leads come mostly in three forms: returning customers, referrals, and advertising. Social media is a package that allows you to do all three.

Photo by John Hagstrom

Everyone prefers the known and trusted to the unknown and unproven. This is why people keep returning to the same businesses. I know the milk at Swan Bro.’s Dairy to be of high quality, so I keep going back. Through my household consumning about a gallon of their milk a day (true story) I’ve developed a congenial relationship with the brothers themselves, their family members that also work there, and a few nonfamily clerks. When they put out a crate of tomatoes for sale I bought some even though I had never had their tomatoes. Gardening and dairy farming only look the same on Hallmark cards, so it’s not that skills translate (that analogy would involve me buying cheese from them.) It’s because I had a positive relationship with them and I interacted with them regularly, about every other day.

There aren’t very many stores, outside of gas stations and grocery stores, that people frequent as often as I do Swan’s Dairy. What if a company like RCP Print Solutions started offering a new product or service? I will probably not see whatever fine little sign they put up in their storefront, like I saw Swan’s tomatoes. However, if they have been maintaining our relationship on Facebook or Google+ by posting engaging content consistently, and put up a blurb there about their new product I will see it and quite possibly act on it.

We're Watching You

On Facebook and Twitter anytime I interact with a page my whole network sees it. When I like a business’ page on Facebook it appears in my profile—right after where I work and who I’m dating! Anyone can see who I’m following on Twitter. My relationship with that business becomes part of my online identity. Both of these social networks keep track of what I do and use it to recommend that account to my network. “Anna Bavido has liked this.” “You follow a user who follows Magic Bottle Marketing.” Social media digitizes and amplifies word-of-mouth.

Photo by InCase.

If you do decide to do advertising online social media allows you to target these by an incredible number of variables. Unlike an ad in the newspaper or TV your online ad is relevent to the viewers and what they’re looking at. You can target by city location, zip code, what other interests they have, what they’re Googling, what language they’re using, age, and gender. You can even exclude certain categories, such as people looking for DIY or people you’ve already reached. I will probably have multiple blogs about advertising online and socially. Consider this just the top of the fork! (Hebrew saying equivalent to the tip of the iceberg)

Best part to my Scottish heart? All of this is free at best or significantly cheaper than other means at worst!

Have I Mentioned You’re My Favorite?

Note: Blog title is a quote from the TV show ‘Reba‘.

Yesterday I talked about leveraging social platforms effectively by not treating them all the same. Here’s a quote from it.

     “I’m not going to dismiss the potential customers on any platform”

But I can’t deny it. Google+ is my favorite. Here’s some of the reasons…

• Circles—the ultimate privacy answer

Before Google+ we had connections on Facebook that had to be mutually agreeable and once someone was your ‘friend’ they had access to everything on your profile. They have been adding ways around this with Lists, but it’s clunky and difficult even for me. Following someone on Twitter allows you to see all their posts, but it doesn’t require reciprocation on their part. Google+ circles gives us the best of both worlds. I know exactly whom I’m sharing every post with. I follow who I want to and I can group for both my own noise control and audience targetting. More on circles here.

• Change we can understand!

Google+ is constantly improving, so things do change. Unlike Facebook or even Twitter’s recent addition of ‘Activity’ Tab, changes on Google+ feel like birthday presents or the pleasant surprise of your bathroom remodel being finished overnight. Why do people like changes on Google+ and hate them on Facebook? Because Google carefully explains how each change works and why they change it. Googel doesn’t try to fix what isn’t broken. Google also listens to feedback with these amazing things called ‘Community Managers’ who show up at every single +mention there is even on their evenings off! The entire process is teachable, transparent, and downright fun.

• Search

It’s Google so I can’t say I’m really surprised. 😉

• Clean interface

Perhaps my little brain is just easily befuddled, but I find Facebook and Twitter to be visually overwhelming. Google+ and Flickr have the best visual designs I have ever seen for a network. They’re convenient, quick, pleasing to the eye, and customizable.

• No word limit

On Google+ there is no word limit anywhere—not in posts, not in comments, not in messages. Be as long-winded as you want! This was popular enough that Facebook recently had to increase their word limit, but they still didn’t get rid of it.

• Automatic credit

On Tumblr, Twitter, and Pinterest I cringe at how little notice is given to whoever spilled their heart blood to write or photograph this piece of art we’re passing around everywhere. I don’t think people on those networks are disrespectful of authors and artists. I think the platform is set up so that it’s extremely difficult to track down the creator or to credit the creator. On Google+ if I write something you can share it and I am credited automatically. My name and profile are sealed to that post and the only way you can separate it is by copy and pasting. A truly determined thief is hard to stop, but most locks are to keep the honest people honest.

You might notice that I did not mention how amazing the people on Google+ are. They are absolutely wonderful, but they would be wonderful no matter where they were. I’m extremely grateful for Google+ connecting me with them, but Google doesn’t really deserve credit for their pure awesomeness.

There’s a lot more to Google+ such as sharing via email, Hangouts, SEO affects, messenger/huddle, not to mention the amazing Chrome extensions that are growing everyday. What I have mentioned is why I personally love Google+. What are your reasons?