You’re on Facebook. You’re doing the Twitter. You’re pinning your little heart out on Pinterest… and yet your social media plans for your small business are stalled.

Here’s 10 small changes you can take to make your small business into a social business today!

#1 Let people know you’re social

Use every interaction you make with everyone you meet a chance to become more social. Believe it or not word of mouth was the original social media. Let people know you are on Facebook so they can like you and Twitter so they can follow you.

#2 Take social media off line

Sounds crazy right? But it works. Make sure you have links to your social media account on all of your marketing collateral, your business card, your invoices, your print media advertising, mention it in your radio spots… everywhere. Make it easy for people to find and connect with you.

#3 Email is really social media too

How many emails do you get a day? How many do you send? Each and everyone of those emails is a chance to show off your social skills. Add icons and links to your social media accounts to your email signature and ask people to connect with you.

#4 Stake your claim early

Use consistent names across all social media sites whenever possible so you can be found easily. You’ll also want to claim your name on every new social media site that comes out just in case it takes off. Otherwise you may end up having to get creative later when your brand name is gone and it’s the next big thing.

#5 Set up a Linkedin company profile

Here’s a quick and simple yet powerful social media marketing device that you can setup in minutes. Most small business’s on LinkedIn have profiles for the individual owners and employees but not a company profile. With a company profile you can centralize communications on LinkedIn, offer jobs and have people “follow” your organization for all updates.

#6 Set up a Facebook Brand Page

The same goes with Facebook. If you’re a small business you can’t just have a personal profile, you need a brand page. Why? If for no other reason than analytics. You’ll get a ton of free information about who is visiting your brand page and how you can better engage with them on Facebook and beyond.

#6 Update your website

Does your website suck? It shouldn’t. If you drive a ton of social media traffic to a dead end website don’t expect any real results and don’t expect anyone to come back again either.

#7 start blogging

Nothing.. that’s right NOTHING is better for kick-starting your social media rock star status like blogging. If you don’t have a company blog, you’re basically invisible to Google. And that’s bad.

#8 Get your staff onboard

If you want to do social media you can. If you want to be a social business, then your whole staff needs to be onboard. Get them trained, get them engaged and help them move with you into the world of social media. Odds are they are doing it anyway and some of them may know more about it than you think. Make social a part of everyone’s job and you’ll immediately being to see results both online and offline.

#9 Act social

Does your business have it’s own personality and culture? For most small business it’s the people that make or break the company. The friendly staff, the excellent service, the efficient workmanship, the quality products, this is what people really like. People do business with people, so speak and act like a human being on social media not like a press release.

#10 Don’t over think it

You don’t have a “phone strategy” do you? You don’t have a fax strategy do you? Then why do you need a “social media strategy”. It’s just talking to people after all and you already know how to do that or you wouldn’t be in business. Social media just offers a new set of tools and a new way to reach more and more people. That’s it.

In conclusion…

There you have it. You don’t have to try them all today, but taking action on 3-4 or these suggestions immediately might just be the quick and easy little thing your need to make your business a little more social today.

Social media is all about transparency, sharing and being your organic authentic self.

Uh-huh.

Well there are some things you should probably just keep to yourself.

Here’s 10 of them:

#1 Your phone number

There are creepy, disturbed people out there on the Internet with ill intentions and bad manners. They are called telemarketers. Don’t feed the telemarketers. Especially after midnight. Sort of like Gremlins.

#2 Pictures of your credit card

Yep. People actually do this. I know you’re proud of your new Toronto Maple Leaf’s branded VISA card, but showing it off on Instagram is like posting Identity theft porn.

#3 Pictures of any bodily function

I know where you think I’m going with this one, but I’m not. I’m talking about potty training. This is one instance where “pics or it didn’t happen” needs to not apply.

#4 This

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

#5 An invitation to “please rob me”

Letting the 1/6 of the human population of this planet that is on Facebook know that you’re in Mexico this week while that brand new 60” TV that you posted about last week is home all alone is an invitation to “please rob me”.

#6 Vaguebooking

“Wondering why…” Me too. Un-follow.

#7 Your password

This one should be at the top of the no-brainer pile. If your password is the name of your cat who has his own Facebook account with 1,632 friends, then you either need to change your password or your cat.

#8 Anything that happened in Vegas

This is a rule for a reason.

#9 Your Klout score or any other social media stat

You’re clearly over compensating for something, which leads to the final thing you should never share on social media…

#10 A naked selfie

If you’re a A list celebrity taking nude pictures of your self in the bathroom with your iPhone for your PR firm to leak to the media that’s fine. Otherwise, not cool.

Got any more suggestions? Share them in the comments below!

Related articles

• 3 Tips to Make Social Media Sharing Quick & Easy! (blogs.constantcontact.com)
• 10 Easy-To-Digest Small Business Social Media Tips (amsterdamprinting.com)
• 13 Experts Chime In on Klout's New Algorithm to Determine Social Influence (windmillnetworking.com)

Tags: Facebook, Klout, Instagram, Social media, VISA, Toronto Maple Leaf, Gremlins, Mexico

There are hundreds of social media and web metrics that you could look at everyday if there was enough time and context to understand each of them.  But without overwhelming you with data and drowning out what is important, there are a few key metrics that you should be monitoring at all times.  Today we’ll cover the 5 metrics social media metrics that you should be aware of and monitoring for a pulse on your social business.

Let’s jump in, and happy monitoring!

1. Engagement – Engagement is one of the most critical areas of social to measure.  Are conversations happening with your brand when you release content?  Are fans liking or commenting on your Facebook page?  Are users pinning images, or retweeting tweets?  There are a slew of different ways to look at engagement depending on the social outposts your are participating on, but the key is that people see your message and interact with your brand.

If you notice a particular set of messages is not working, dont give up but try changing the messaging and measure the type of response that you achieve.  Look at what and how your competitors are doing across their social outposts, are they achieving a level of engagement?  If so what are they posting that’s different?  Evaluate their outreach and share information that makes your brand unique, that will likely bring the most engagement of all.

Tip: Make it fun to interact with your brand.  You dont have to post your latest press release on Facebook all the time, try some humor (if your audience will react well to it) and different variations of content to get fans involved.

2. Reach – What size is the audience seeing your content over all of the social networks that you participate in?  Is this audience growing or shrinking and at what rate?  These are key questions to consider when looking at your total social reach think of it as  the number of potential people that have potential to see your content.

Reach by itself does not tell the whole story but should be used in conjunction with other metrics to calculate the specific metrics that you are looking for.  For example, if we wanted to find out the percentage of people that were engaged with your page this week and tallied up all our ‘likes’ (let’s assume 609,750), then we would use the following formula:

Weekly Total Engagement Rate =  609,750/ 12,449,380 or 4.898%.

The point is that you can use total reach for a number of different metrics that are important to you and your business and simply calculate them by switching out the formula.  Try it out on your own metrics.

3. Referral Traffic - Getting fans to interact with your brand at various social outposts is great, but the real goal should ideally be to drive more sustainable and repeat traffic to your website.  To determine if you are accomplishing this look in your web analytics tool at referral traffic to see specifically where traffic is coming from.  For Google Analytics users, go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals.

Once in this dashboard take a look at your top performing referral source, and the respective time on site and bounce rate for each.  If one particular source is producing a number of visitors but they are only staying on your page for minimal time and driving your bounce rate up – then it is likely not the right source for that particular piece of content.

Diving one level deeper, you can click on any content referrer to see which specific content is driving traffic or switch the primary dimension to landing page and then viewing the referring source that is driving traffic to that content.  This is important as if you have different series of blog posts and your first series is generating great traffic through Facebook, and your second through Pinterest than you now know where to target these different segments of posts for sharing.  On the whole that is simplifying the concept a lot but you should understand that if sharing content on a network is driving down your time on site, and your bounce rate up then it’s worth re-evaluating that as a real traffic source.

4. Share of Voice -  Share of Voice (SOV) is basically a measure of how much you’re mentioned or covered in comparison with your competitors.  If your competitors are being mentioned far more often share of voice is an easy measure of showing you this.  Ensure that you are participating in all of the relevant conversations for your brand regardless of where they occur, but most importantly wherever your key customers are.  There is a free tool to help determine your SOV Socialmention or if you have a budget it’s worth looking into a tool like Radian6 (now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud).

5. Influence - There are a number of different influence startups emerging like Klout, PeerIndex, andKred.  Influence is an important metric to monitor because even if the people talking about your brand have large followings, whether they can influence others to take action is critical.  It’s also a great quick snapshot at how your brand is participating in social media against some competitors.

Tags: Facebook, Google Analytics, Social media, Social network

You may not be surprised to learn the best time to find a job is when you already have a job. Recent ERE.net research shows that some employers consider passive candidates—people not actively looking for work because they're employed—one of the best sources of hires.

When you consider that no job is forever, and the fact that the average employee will have between 10 and 15 jobs in a career, it's wise to take action to positively influence your chances to land a new job, even if you don't think you need one right now.

Jonathan Kreindler, founder of FreshTransition.com, a free, web-based career management system that provides guidance from a community of career experts, suggests these tips to help you stay competitive when your next transition may be just around the corner:

1. Broaden your scope. Kreindler notes: "While you likely have a full-plate at work already, consider ways to take on different challenges within your role. When you do, you'll not only become more valuable to your current employer, but you'll learn new skills, enhance your experience, and expand the number of opportunities you'll be suitable for next time you're actively looking."

2. Seize opportunities to try new things. While it is important to have niche expertise, don't let yourself be pigeonholed in one very specific area for years on end. Keep a close eye on where your field is headed and don't keep your head buried in the sand. When you're aware of trends and potential hot areas, you'll be in a better position to advance your career.

3. Don't be passive, but passively search. "Conducting a passive search doesn't necessarily mean you're applying for jobs with the intention of leaving your current role behind. Rather, it's all about exploring your options, understanding your value, and determining what gaps exist between the role you have today and the role you aspire to in the future," explains Kreindler.

Research your competitors by tracking their social media company pages (especially on LinkedIn, where you'll be able to tell when companies hire new people). Follow industry leaders on social media and keep track of the news about your field. One easy way to do this is to find and follow industry thought leaders on Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. Read their updates and you'll keep up-to-date about what is going on in your field with very little effort on your part.

4. Prepare for surprises. Few would question that being prepared is the best way to reduce the impact of a work-related surprise. Kreindler notes: "Knowing what other job options are available to you while you're employed enables you to hit-the-ground running if you find yourself on the receiving-end of a career surprise."

He adds, "Starting a job search from scratch takes time, but turning your passive search into an active search requires only a change in your mind set."

Sign up for job alerts, keep an eye on jobs posted on LinkedIn (which shows you who posted the job and how you're connected to that person), and stay up-to-date on news that affects your industry. If a major competitor just won a huge government contract, for example, you want to make sure you know. Sign up for Google alerts for company names so you will receive emails as soon as Google indexes something about the organization.

5. Explore your interests and recalibrate as you go. "Always make a point to explore interesting careers, learn about the skills you'll need, and network with people who have jobs that you aspire to," Kreindler notes. When you activelyexplore and research, you'll decrease the chances that you'll be caught off guard when it's time to find something new. Additionally, Kreindler says: "You'll build your network, make yourself more employable, and focus on a direction where you want to go with your career."

Manage your own career, whether you're looking for a new job or not. Keep ahead of the competition and make yourself more marketable by planning ahead and keeping abreast of your options. You'll decrease the amount of time you spend between opportunities.

Miriam Salpeter is a job search and social media consultant, career coach, author, speaker, resume writer, and owner of Keppie Careers. She is author of Social Networking for Career Success. Miriam teaches job seekers and entrepreneurs how to incorporate social media tools along with traditional strategies to empower their success.

Tags: LinkedIn, Employment, Twitter, Job hunting, Social media, Google, Kreindler, Google+

Quality and Quantity: Strive to publish great content as regularly as possible. Some of your articles won’t always hit the mark but when they do, they have the potential to go viral and your thought leadership will be shared widely across the social web.


Size Doesn’t Matter: There is no standard issue for the length of an article, duration of a video or number of pages in a white paper. Great content can run to many thousands of words or just a couple of sentences. Just make sure it’s relevant, interesting and timely – and you won’t go far wrong.

Words and Pictures: It might be a cliché – but it still rings true. A picture is worth 1,000 words and when available you should always use them. If that picture moves (i.e. video) – even better.

Get to the point: There is no need to dazzle your audience with endless streams of eloquent prose introducing your latest concept or best practice. Get to the point (starting with a solid headline) or you’ll risk losing your audience at the first hurdle.

Solve Problems: The best content helps to solve your customers’ problems and therefore validates your position as an expert. Don’t try and second guess your customers problems, ask them what makes their lives difficult and they will probably give you a list to work from.

Always Include a Call to Action: Remind your audience to do something after or during consuming your content. “Buy Now”, “Learn More” and “Register Here” are all good starting points. Remember this is marketing and it should lead to an action that can be tracked and reported against.

Make it Easy to Share: Make your content easy to share by including social media “share” buttons on every piece of content.

Re-Use, Re-Appropriate and Re-Cycle: Could a blog post be turned into a more detailed white paper? Could a webinar turn into a physical event or YouTube video? Great content has legs and screams to be used across a variety of media.

Don’t Forget Email: If your content has value (and it should do) then let your customers’ and prospects’ email addresses be the currency used to pay for it. Use email gateway pages to grant access to detailed content or include email registration forms or pop-ups on blog posts to drive subscriptions.Email Marketing services like iContact will provide you with all the tools you need to set this up.

Get Social and Distribute Widely: Great content is the foundation of any social media strategy. Distribute it, discuss it and review it via social media. Social engagement will lead to more ideas, new opportunities and wider recognition of you, your brand and your position as an expert in your own particular niche.

Online PR: Great thought leadership is highly newsworthy. Use an online news release tool like PRWeb to distribute your content to journalists, influential bloggers and across all the major search engines (this will also aid your SEO efforts significantly).

Just Do It: Your content needs to be well thought out and planned – but don’t let over planning delay your output. The best content marketers are agile and can turn ideas around quickly to take advantage of opportunities as and when they arise.

Tags: Social media, YouTube, Marketing, iContact, Search engine optimization, Internet marketing, Business, Marketing and Advertising

An extremely fragile week – at one end it was the ban on YouTube in Kashmir, a very cool app from Indian Railways for the common man and then end of the week we saw Bangalore Police creating a fabulous presence on Facebook. We also revealed Sony’s year long massive initiative on social media and brought you the latest Socialbakers report, ORM the Airtel way and the amazing content strategy on Idea’s Facebook page.

With that we came across some interesting articles that we have curated below for your weekend reading pleasure.

1. Indian government and social media: Priyanka writes about the Indian government and how the other politicians are using the medium effectively and trying to bridge the gap between their fans. Whether it be Narendra Modi or Mamata Banerjee or Shashi Tharoor every one out there is trying to connect with fans. Along with them, there are official departments like the various city traffic police officials who have set a great example. Wonder when can we see the PMO India using it in a similar way.

2. Instagram is two years old: Here’s to more food pictures: Instagram turned two years old recently and in this post, Hilonee writes about the growth story of the app. In these two years, the app has grown from time to time even though there are multiple other players in the same market. The billion dollar deal and how the Indian brands have shown interest in this popularly growing network which is a part of Facebook now. So be prepared to see more pictures of food, cats, dogs, etc.

3. Facebook contests- the ones where you don’t really want to participate: Palin pulls up a trend and shares his thoughts in this lovely crisp post. We all have seen the growing trend of contests like upload the photo and get likes from friends or quiz contests that you can play as long as you get them right. Contests should be easy but then for some free vouchers it’s really not worth the effort. Brands need to make the fan earn and provide cool gifts rather than make it easy and offer her gift vouchers.

4. How to design your platform for self- expression: Sangeet, a keen observer of different platforms in the market starts with sharing his thoughts on why would a user talk about a certain product. Sangeet also talks about the simplicity of platforms but then he discusses the downside of such social networks too. Towards the end, he explains how one should design for self-expression.

5. All about: Web-based video content: In this article at Campaign India, Gunjan finds out whether online video services are feasible in India or still ahead of their time. Media experts believe only freemium model will work in India for the lack of required bandwidth, HD content and user rejection of subscription models. However, it is interesting to note that 3G has enabled video communications on mobile with marketers showcasing their brands and engaging with users.

6. An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Rajesh via his blog post wishes the man who has managed to connect one billion people across the world. There is no doubt that the platform has made the world look smaller but in the quest of making it more open and sharing, the “promise of intimate conversations” is missing. Today fans have become a mass rather than individuals, risking the social network to be another platform of mass media. Interesting thoughts and along with Mark’s hunger for driving more revenue, a lot of marketers and agencies are to be blamed to a large extent. They have been feeding fans with content on a mass basis since they treat the platform as another mode of advertising. A trend that needs to change.

We hope that you enjoy our curated list for this week and do let us know if you would like to add some more articles to the list. You can always leave them as a comment or tweet us at @LHInsights.

Image courtesy: Instagram

Marketing is a big job and it’s something you have to do regularly in order to reap the rewards. You shouldn’t cut corners in your marketing, of course, but if you could find ways to get some free help with it, wouldn’t that be good?

Did you know your customers can help you with your marketing?

If you do a good job and deliver for your customers, they’ll happily go out of their way to promote your brand. Not only can their help save you time and money butword of mouth marketing can be one of the best ways for you to attract even more happy customers.

Read on for some of the ways others can help you with your marketing:

1. Reviews

Product reviews are very valuable to your small business. Many people who shop online for a product or service will read reviews to help them make a decision. Your customers’ reviews and testimonials work wonders for helping you build credibility and trust with prospects.

No matter how well you tell people that you are an expert in your field, a positive review from a customer works better to make people take a chance in buying from you.

Consider adding a testimonials section to your website, if you don’t already have one. When you receive positive feedback, ask if you can share it. Actively managing your online reputation is also wise as you can find good reviews to share. Also pay attention to any not-so-good reviews to help you learn, improve, and grow.

2. Social Media

Social proof is powerful. Building a social media presence provides great opportunities to converse with your customers. When customers and prospects converse with your business publicly, they are opening the door to possible future business opportunities.

Every time your followers hit ‘like’ or ‘re-tweet’, they’re marketing your small business.

A good social media strategy will help you reap some significant rewards. The viral effect of a brand’s community can be amazing for business growth!

3. Referrals

Word of mouth referrals are great. It costs you nothing to acquire a new customer when this happens and referrals often become repeat and long-term clients.

Encouraging referrals is a great way to get customers to help you find new customers. Incentives work great. If you can offer incentives for referrals, you’ll get the attention of happy customers who want to be rewarded for helping your company succeed.

Happy customers will also do referrals for free when they see that you go above and beyond the average call of duty. Provide an above average customer experience andbe their favorite salesperson!

Don’t be afraid to ask happy customers for referrals.

Having go-to resources for client referrals and publishing case studies can be great for business. By illustrating your success with others, you can remove the barriers to buying for those who are shopping around and looking at you as a potential supplier.

You can’t rely on customers to do all of your marketing for you but with the nature of the internet, along with offline marketing and word of mouth referrals, the right strategies could see your cost of marketing go down and your results go up. Way up!

Tags: Small business, Business, Customer, Marketing, Review, Word-of-mouth marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Social Media

Quality and Quantity: Strive to publish great content as regularly as possible. Some of your articles won’t always hit the mark but when they do, they have the potential to go viral and your thought leadership will be shared widely across the social web.

Size Doesn’t Matter: There is no standard issue for the length of an article, duration of a video or number of pages in a white paper. Great content can run to many thousands of words or just a couple of sentences. Just make sure it’s relevant, interesting and timely – and you won’t go far wrong.

Words and Pictures: It might be a cliché – but it still rings true. A picture is worth 1,000 words and when available you should always use them. If that picture moves (i.e. video) – even better.
Get to the point: There is no need to dazzle your audience with endless streams of eloquent prose introducing your latest concept or best practice. Get to the point (starting with a solid headline) or you’ll risk losing your audience at the first hurdle.

Solve Problems: The best content helps to solve your customers’ problems and therefore validates your position as an expert. Don’t try and second guess your customers problems, ask them what makes their lives difficult and they will probably give you a list to work from.

Always Include a Call to Action: Remind your audience to do something after or during consuming your content. “Buy Now”, “Learn More” and “Register Here” are all good starting points. Remember this is marketing and it should lead to an action that can be tracked and reported against.

Make it Easy to Share: Make your content easy to share by including social media “share” buttons on every piece of content.

Re-Use, Re-Appropriate and Re-Cycle: Could a blog post be turned into a more detailed white paper? Could a webinar turn into a physical event or YouTube video? Great content has legs and screams to be used across a variety of media.

Don’t Forget Email: If your content has value (and it should do) then let your customers’ and prospects’ email addresses be the currency used to pay for it. Use email gateway pages to grant access to detailed content or include email registration forms or pop-ups on blog posts to drive subscriptions. Email Marketing services like iContact will provide you with all the tools you need to set this up.

Get Social and Distribute Widely: Great content is the foundation of any social media strategy. Distribute it, discuss it and review it via social media. Social engagement will lead to more ideas, new opportunities and wider recognition of you, your brand and your position as an expert in your own particular niche.

Online PR: Great thought leadership is highly newsworthy. Use an online news release tool like PRWeb to distribute your content to journalists, influential bloggers and across all the major search engines (this will also aid your SEO efforts significantly).

Just Do It: Your content needs to be well thought out and planned – but don’t let over planning delay your output. The best content marketers are agile and can turn ideas around quickly to take advantage of opportunities as and when they arise.

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

It's no secret. When engineers built Google+, they constructed an SEO juggernautto dominate search results above all other social platforms. Although Facebook and Twitter are essential to marketing efforts, both restrict Google from accessing much of their data. This limits their SEO effectiveness.

Not so with Google+.

Here’s an experiment: If you use Google+, perform a search for your name and check the domain distribution of first 100 results. The graph below shows what happens when searching my own name.

Even though I use Twitter and Facebook far more often, Google+ dominates the search results. Google+ even beats SEOmoz and my own blog. Multiply this for 100's of millions of people, and you can begin to comprehend the scope of Google's platform.

Fortunately, there are several ways to take advantage of this SEO domination for your own benefit.

1. Follow your profile links

Consider this: at SEOmoz you must earn 200 Mozpoints before earning a followed profile link (submit good comments!) On the other hand, Google+ not only allows you to link to your other profiles across the web, but you can embed followed links directly into your bio with the anchor text of your choice.

The value of a link from Google+ is, in theory, like any other. It depends on the authority of both the page and domain. My own profile shows the following metrics:

• MozRank: 1.91
• PageAuthority: 49
• PageRank: 3

If you can raise your visibility by getting more people to engage with you, share your posts, or link directly to your profile, the more valuable your profile links become.

2. Embed post links

Like profile links, Google+ also allows you to insert followed links directly into your posts – as many as you want. Simply insert the full URL and Google will automatically format it as a link.

The value of these links increases the number of times the post is shared, linked to and +1’ed.

For example, check out this one sentence post from Alexia Tsotsis, which has a PageRank of 3 and is cached by Google every couple of weeks. (Even though PageRank is not highly correlated with rankings, for Google+ it’s often the only metric available.)

If your post goes viral or is reshared by high-authority profiles, the value of those links increases.

3. Optimize your G+ title tags

The first sentence of your Google+ post becomes part of the title tag, which ishighly correlated with rankings and greatly influences click-through rates. Choose your keywords carefully and consider that the first sentence will be the first thing most people see.

Check out how this simple post from Danny Sullivan ranks for its title.

A widely shared post with a good title has an excellent chance of ranking for its given keywords.

4. Unlimited editing power

Google+ is just like your own mini personal blogging platform. This means you can fully edit any of your posts at any time. Not so with Facebook or Twitter. Facebook gives you only limited editing abilities. Twitter, after you tweet, only lets you delete.

This is important if your Google+ post goes viral and you want to make updates or changes. If need be, you can also update the title tag and any attached media as well.

You may not own the platform, but Google+ gives you a broad amount of control over your own content.

5. Index new content lightning fast

If you share new content on Google+, chances are that Google will index the page very quickly.

Rumor has it that new URLs are crawled almost instantly. This makes complete sense as part of the purpose of Google+ was to replace Twitter when creating Google's Realtime Search.

In the old days, if you wanted a website indexed you filled out a webform and waited several weeks. Today, it's as simple as pressing a +1 button.

“Google+ is the new Google Submit URL box.”
- Rand Fishkin, GROW 2012 Source

Share your new content on Google+, as well as your other social networks, for quick indexation.

6. Stalk Connect with influencers

Google+ lists 17 different notification triggers that can help you connect with influencers in your industry.

Depending on the individual's account settings, these notifications can take the form of an email, phone SMS, or the omnipresent red Google notification bar.

17 actions that trigger notifications:

1. Mention them in a post 
2. Share a post with them directly 
3. Share a post and you're in a circle they subscribe to 
4. Comment on a post they created 
5. Comment on a post after they comment on it 
6. Add them to a circle 
7. Suggest new people to add to their circles 
8. Tag them in a photo 
9. Tag one of their photos 
10. Suggest a profile photo for them
11. Comment on a photo after they comment on it 
12. Comment on a photo they are tagged in 
13. Comment on a photo they tagged 
14. Start a conversation with them
15. Send them an invitation or update an event
16. Remind them about events
17. Any activity on events they created 

Several folks have introduced themselves to me on Google+ by "gently" using the methods above.

Be warned: the few who crossed the line into spamminess have been banned from several inboxes forever.

7. Optimize your author pic for more traffic

Last spring, I performed a series of tests with my Google+ author photo that led to an increase in the click-though rate for my websites.

If you successfully implement the author tag and have a catchy photo, it often doesn't matter if you rank 2nd, 3rd or even 4th. With an eye-catching pic you can often grab free traffic away from even your competitor's #1 ranking.

8. Test drive a G+ social media dashboard

Google Analytics has progressed greatly with social media reporting, but if you live and die by social traffic you want to bring the information front and center.

Adam Singer created an awesome social media dashboard that you can use for free. At one glance you can view all your essential metrics from Google+ traffic and all other social networks including:

• On Site Social Actions, i.e. Google +1's
• Revenue per Visit by Social Network
• Overall Traffic Stats by Social Source

Bonus: Install this dashboard for free in your Google Analytics account by clicking here.

9. Check your CircleRank

My favorite new tool is CircleCount. Try it now by pasting in your Google+ URL tochart your daily follower growth, the virality of your posts, and even see your "CircleRank" score compared against all other Google+ profiles.

CircleRanks of note:

• Rand Fishkin: 2,214
• Barack Obama: 43
• Brittany Spears: 1

The election is over. Brittany won.

10. Be an awesome (Late) early adopter

Even with it's explosive growth, only 1 in 4 people use Google+ once a month. The rest log in even less, although this number is growing fast.

None of these tips matter unless you actually use Google+. Out of the 400 folks I've circled in my Google+, only about 75 actively participate. No surprise, these tend to be the more savvy SEO and media types.

There's still time. Folks are catching on. Yes, early adopters win the day.

You can do Google+ in less than 10 minutes a day. This means creating a few simple habits to fit it into your workflow.

• Press the +1 button to spread share worthy comment
• ...  add comments on the truly great stuff
• Add +1 Buttons on Your Own Content
• Engage / Comment / Reshare / Start a Hangout / Create an Event
• Circle Great People
• Make it Easy for People to Circle You...

Top-notch resources:

The first 3 belong to AJ Kohn, the authority's authority when it comes to Google+.

What's your favorite Google+ tip? Please share in the comments below.

Tags: Google, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Search engine optimization, SEOmoz, Uniform Resource Locator, Web search engine