Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...While Morter's campaigns began on Twitter, changes in the social networks have altered his approach, with Facebook sidelined in favour of Twitter and the rising Google+.

"It's only going to get bigger," Morter says. "It was a slow start but I genuinely think Google+ is going to be one of the big players. It's so integrated with Google itself now and with their tie-in to YouTube it will get bigger. Unofficially, I believe the Google +1 button really does help your search engine optimisation on Google, I've got no doubts about that whatsoever, so for that side of things I think it's a vital tool."

Google announced in December last year that the number of active monthly users on the site had increased to 135 million. The network integrates with other Google products, such as search, gmail, calendar and drive, and all new gmail accounts are Google+ enabled....

Let’s start with a test: type Coca Cola into the magic Google form. The results are just a calibrated mix of brand websites and PR initiatives such as micro-sites, social media accounts, news, images and videos.

One new feature you might notice however, is the latest introductions to Google+ – the authorship mark-up. Among its functions as a social media platform, is that the authorship system makes it possible to connect online journalists’ Google+ profiles into their published articles.

In turn it provides journalists with abnormal ranking power for articles they are signing off on, using their Google+ profile These can quickly build up ranking levels proportionally to the importance of their publishers and to the number of people in their Google+ circles. Journalists with a high number of Google+ followers are gaining huge visibility online and their articles can jump straight....