Thanks to its integration with other Google products like YouTube and search results, Google+ provides more opportunities to interact with your audience and drive web traffic than any other social platform.
But to drive this traffic, you must first get your guests to engage. On Google+, this means learning a new set of best practices to get your content noticed, shared and talked about.
1. Focus On Your Headline
One of the key challenges on Google+, as on any social platform, is getting your posts noticed amidst the deluge of new content constantly being posted to the site.
As always, adding an interesting headline will help you stand out from the crowd, and Google will incorporate these words into the title tag of the post. Even more significantly, Google will typically display your title in the SERPs, which means picking the right combination of words can greatly influence the volumes of people who notice your content and click-through to find out more.
2. Get Wordy
Twitter and Facebook are all about the short and pithy post. On Google+ however, you shouldn’t be afraid of creating longer posts.
Instead of simply sharing a link to your resort’s latest blog post and hoping your guests click on it, explain why they should by adding some context in the form of a short summary of the key points. It only takes a few minutes and could pay dividends when it comes to traffic volume and re-shares.
3. Use Images Effectively
Nearly all of the most popular posts on Google+ contain images or GIFs, so if you want to drive those shares, you better include an image in everything you post too.
Google automatically tries to include an image for any URL you include in your post, however these default images are often not ideal, or are sized incorrectly, so it’s usually best to upload your own eye-catching image to grab your guests’ attention and drive traffic and shares.
4. Targeted Sharing
Although most people choose to set their Google+ posts to ‘public’ to maximise exposure, there’s actually a far more targeted, more effective way to get your stuff seen by the right people.
Try adding your circles, or even select individuals you’d particularly like to target to your share settings. When you publish your post, these people will receive a notification that you’ve shared a new piece of content directly with them, and this can be a great motivator when it comes to sharing or making a comment.
Be warned: although these notifications are a great way to drive engagement, they can easily be construed as spam if you fall back on them too often. Use them sparingly, and only for your very best posts.
Google+ membership is growing rapidly. By taking the time to build up a strong audience on there today, you might just reap big rewards in the near future.
Is your property active on Google+? Do you receive much traffic from the platform?
Let us know in the comments below!
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