Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Google+ has gotten a bad rap. In April, TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotis and Matthew Panzarino called the social network the “walking dead” and a whole slew of other media outlets began publishing their takes on whether it would ever be able to gain any traction among its users.

From the sounds of things, a lot of marketers would rather focus on the host of other networks out there, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. But when small businesses and marketing firms ignore Google+, they’re actually throwing away a potential gem of self-promotion, says Phil Penton, president of Social Integration, a Chicago-based digital marketing agency....

As Google+ has over 300m active users (and growing), I am always keen to learn how I can use the platform more effectively. This week, I was very lucky to catch up with Google+ guru Martin Shervington in a Hangout before his talk at Social Media Marketing World. The downside of a Google Hangout was that I could see he was on the sunny West Coast of the US while I was sitting in the dark in London, but on the positive side I learned a huge amount about how to maximise my use of Google+. Martin also shared his advice for people new to the platform.

While Google+ was slow to take off, since it launched, early adopters have seen a remarkable uptick in engagement and are beginning to understand what succeeds on G+.

While the platform may not yet have the fan base of Twitter or Facebook, Google+ has been steadily gaining ground and convincing users to try it out. Further, many of the questions that skeptics initially had about how to use G+ have been clarified through analytics data: For example, the most popular post types on G+ are photos, followed by articles. However, all of this talk about the success of Google+ is cold comfort for marketers who are unsure how to measure their effective content marketing efforts on G+. Here, we’ll take a look at some of the best strategies out there for analyzing your brand’s Google+ successes....

After enhancing their Google+ profiles, the businesses increased the instances in which they ranked in the top seven local positions by 179 percent, in the top two positions by 399 percent, and in the third through fifth positions by 97 percent.

The opportunity to boost local rankings and visibility by focusing local SEO tactics on Google+ continues to prove itself out as a winning strategy that can pay big dividends, according to a new aggregate case study from SIM Partners (disclosure: I work for SIM Partners), "How Your Competition is Beating You With Google+ Local Optimization".

Keep in mind just how local consumers' use of Google has become; according to a report from MDG Advertising:

-  59 percent of consumers use Google every month to find a reputable, local business.

-  50 percent of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results, and

-  61 percent of those searches result in a purchase....