As an online marketer, the people that actively engage with your message and spread it on to their wider social community are your biggest asset. Perhaps more than any other social platform, Google+ makes it easy to reach out to these brand evangelists and take their invaluable word-of-mouth marketing to the next level. Want to know how? Just keep reading…
Before you get started
Before you start searching for your evangelists on Google+, create a new circle for them – this will help you keep track of your most committed fans as you come across them.
Step 1: Search Google+ For Your Biggest Fans
To begin, search for people who are talking about your resort within Google+. You can use your property name and relevant hashtags or keywords eg. “Gold Coast hotel” and can filter your search by clicking on the More tab.
Your search will display content related to the hashtag you search for, and by clicking on the hashtag you can flip the card to access yet more relevant content from other Google+ users.
Scroll through the results, paying close attention to the level of engagement each person’s posts generate. Once you identify a Google+ user who has a reasonable amount of engagement, go to the upper-right corner of the card, click the arrow and select View Ripples from the dropdown list.
Ripples offers an easy to understand visual representation of the influence of a sharer. When you find someone who has shared your content and appears to have significant influence within the platform, add them to the new ‘evangelists’ circle you created at the beginning.
Step 2: Mine Google Search Results
After you’ve found out who’s sharing your content or talking about your property on Google+, it’s time to mine the Google search results pages themselves for anyone else who might help you widen your social reach. By searching on a few of the most common queries you experience from your guests, you may be able to identify people who write on relevant subjects that align with your resort or hotel.
Thanks to the arrival of Google authorship, it’s easy to access author’s Google+ details right next to their articles simply by clicking on their circles in their byline. Once you’ve checked that the authors have significant influence within the platform using the method in step one, you can go about collecting another set of people who could come in useful as evangelists for your brand on Google+. If you like, add these to a second circle labelled ‘potential evangelists.’
Step 3: Engage, Engage, Engage
Now that you’ve identified the people that are actively sharing your content on Google+ - as well as the influential people who could potentially be interested in doing so - don’t wait to start engaging with them.
To get things rolling, simply click on someone’s circle to view members’ content, then get stuck in commenting, sharing and handing out +1s. Once you start engaging regularly with a user’s content, it’s likely they’ll want to connect with you and will eventually return the favour, helping spread the word about your property across Google+.
Building a strong community around you to spread the word about your brand is what social media marketing is all about. Have you identified your biggest fans on Google+? If so, do you engage with them regularly to leverage brand awareness? Let us know in the comments below.
