Using Google+ For App Development And Marketing
When it rains, it pours. For over 2 weeks, Google+ has dominated the tech news spotlight and early adopters have spent countless hours experimenting with it. Some have even tried to launch organizational accounts for their businesses, only to be told by Google to wait a bit. Obviously Google has a plan for such accounts, and they’ll most likely differ from the ordinary social stream that individuals are currently able to enjoy.
There’s been much speculation over what Google+ for business will do and how businesses will be able to utilize it to interact with customers and drive sales. While details are still under wraps, there are a number of considerations that developers should be making in order to better collaborate and promote apps using Google+.
Use circles. To anyone who’s used Google+, or even read some basic guides, this should be insanely obvious. Making a circle of known developers is a great way to network, share ideas and support each other. At Sinecure Industries, we do most of our external communication via Twitter, which has worked well enough. But since Goolge+ merges Twitter’s following system with Facebook’s lengthy character limit, communication can take place in more descriptive passages, with video and imagry to boot. This is a clear improvement on using Twitter as a communication system, assuming our developer acquaintances embrace Google+ as happily as we have.
We also plan to create a circle for app review sites, like one of our Twitter lists that serves much the same purpose. This will helps us communicate more effectively with potential reviewers who can give our completed apps visibility and feedback. Of course, at present, it seems as though making circles of entities would require knowing the real names behind an app brand or a review blog. We look forward to Google+ business accounts which will allow a kind of richer reproduction of our Twitter relationships, where real names are not necessary to connect.
Customers or friends? Facebook, by its very nature and history, is a place where people who know each other go to connect. By choosing the word “friend” to describe the relationship between users, it pigeonholed itself as a certain type of social network. Adding the ability to “Like” a business or organization was merely an afterthought that probably didn’t sit extremely well with most users.
As mentioned above, Google+ uses the Twitter model of “following,” which can be a one-way or a two-way street. This is more conducive to marketing and client engagement, and will probably make the jump from Twitter to Google+. The one big change is that Google+ is a content-rich environment, compared with Twitter’s bare bones approach.
Armed with a base of Google+ followers and the ability to post rich content (images, blog teasers, video), developers can now ofter more captivating nuggets to their fans. If you’ve done your work properly, your fans will share this content with their circles and help do the marketing for you.
Plus one. That tiny “+1” button isn’t just Google’s version of the “Like” button. It’s a way that Google will merge algorithmic search with the discerning tastes of users, producing a hybrid system for delivering personalized search results. If your Google+ content is consistently good, you’ll earn more +1s, and actually affect your own search results. Craft your posts wisely.
Once Google rolls out their business profiles, the potential uses and benefits to developers will be clearer. Until then, we’ll be waiting with anticipation.
