Google Plus Cir­cles Tu­to­r­ial – How To Use Cir­cles For Your Business

Up­date Jan­u­ary 2016: This epic ar­ti­cle was first pub­lished in March 2014.

I have since given up on Google Plus, and I do not rec­om­mend putting any time or money into G+ marketing.

I’m pretty sure the ser­vice will shut­down within the next 3 years. User en­gage­ment has been a prob­lem even at the best times of this fad­ing service.

Now, since Google has sep­a­rated the most pop­u­lar fea­tures from G+, it is more than ever a place for Big G’s hard­core fans. Also, the re­cent mas­sive user in­ter­face change has con­fused many.

In­stead of hop­ing for this pa­tient on life sup­port to come back to life, rather in­vest your time and mar­ket­ing bud­get into this pro­fes­sional but un­der­rated net­work, and into this proven-to-be-suc­cess­­ful mar­ket­ing chan­nel.

Don’t hes­i­tate to con­nect with me on these two places.

And here’s the orig­i­nal ar­ti­cle: „Google Plus Cir­cles Tu­to­r­ial – How To Use Cir­cles For Your Business.”

Cir­cles, and es­pe­cially shared cir­cles, are Google’s in­no­v­a­tive tool to net­work with peo­ple and to man­age your con­nec­tions on Google Plus. Once you un­der­stand how cir­cles work, you’ll fall in love with Google Plus. You’ll quickly see that no other so­cial net­work of­fers such de­tailed and so­phis­ti­cated net­work­ing possibilities.

This is a long post. 5000 Words, 29,000 Pix­els long! 23 Im­ages, Screen Shots, and Videos.

It’s NOT A QUICK START TUTUORIAL. To mas­ter Google cir­cles, you’ll need 3 to 4 months of us­ing them day by day. You’ll need time experimenting

• how to find the best peo­ple to add,
• how to man­age cir­cles and ‘cir­cle shares’ technically,
• and how to ac­tu­ally en­gage with peo­ple for best results.

Don’t be dis­cour­aged about the learn­ing phase. You’ll make good use of your time!

While learn­ing how cir­cles work, you’ll build a strong pres­ence on Google Plus, you’ll get fol­low­ers , and you’ll in­crease your en­gage­ment rate.

I fo­cus on us­ing Google Plus for busi­ness, but if you use it just for fun, you’ll find a lot of the tips be­low help­ful as well.

It’s worth not­ing that ac­tiv­ity, time on site, and niches on Google Plus are still much less than on Face­book – de­spite what Google Plus en­thu­si­asts are telling you.

You may not im­me­di­ately find great ac­tiv­ity in your spe­cific niche on g+, so treat it strate­gi­cally. Also, you don’t have the ad­ver­tis­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties Face­book, LinkedIn, or Twit­ter offer.

Why is it im­por­tant, then?

Be­cause 5 years from now Google Plus will be more im­por­tant than Face­book. 10 years from now Face­book will be for­got­ten. Google will still be the biggest player on the internet.

If you haven’t yet, now is the time to po­si­tion your busi­ness on Google Plus. If you’re one of the first in your niche to take it se­ri­ously, you’ll have an ad­van­tage. You can claim a lead­er­ship po­si­tion for your business.

What Are Cir­cles And How Do They Work?

A cir­cle is a list of peo­ple who you fol­low on Google Plus. To ‚cir­cle‘ some­one means to add a per­son or g+ page to such a list. It’s also called ‚adding some­one to a circle.‘

From that mo­ment on you’ll see this per­son’s posts in your ‘home’ stream.

If you’re new to cir­cles, get started with this en­ter­tain­ing cir­cle video by Google, named ‘What are circles?’

Through­out this post I’ll mostly talk about ‘adding peo­ple’ but it means ‘pages’ as well. The post cov­ers how you can use cir­cles with your pro­file to mar­ket your business.

• A cir­cle can con­tain up to 5000 people.
• You can have many circles.
• All your cir­cles com­bined can­not con­tain more than 5000 peo­ple. If you hit that limit, you need to re­move peo­ple be­fore you can add new ones.
• One per­son can be in many cir­cles. It counts as 1 per­son to­wards your limit of 5000 persons.
• Up­dates from peo­ple in your cir­cles will show up in your main newsfeed.
• You can ex­clude cer­tain cir­cles from your main news­feed, or re­duce the amount of con­tent that’s shown from a cir­cle in your main newsfeed.
• Each cir­cle has its own news­feed. You can switch be­tween news­feeds to only see up­dates from peo­ple in one spe­cific circle.

Cir­cles are a lot like Twit­ter lists and Face­book lists for friends, but they do have im­por­tant fea­tures, that nei­ther Twit­ter nor Face­book offer. 

Now for the truly awe­some things you can do with circles!

1. You can pub­lish posts that are only vis­i­ble to peo­ple in spe­cific cir­cles. De­pend­ing on their set­tings, those peo­ple might get no­ti­fied or even emailed about your post. Learn  more: Google Help: Who Can See Your Posts
2. You can share cir­cles as Google Plus post. Such a shared cir­cle can be vis­i­ble to every­one, or only to peo­ple in se­lected circles.
3. Every­body who can see a shared cir­cle can add all or se­lected peo­ple from the cir­cle to her own circles.
4. You can em­bed shared cir­cles into blog posts, i.e. on your own web site. Tech­ni­cally you em­bed the Google plus post that dis­plays the cir­cle. The cir­cle post is func­tional within your blog post.

Here’s A Shared Cir­cle Em­bed­ded Right Into This Blog Post!

In this ‘Cir­cles for Busi­ness’ tu­to­r­ial I’ll fo­cus on more on so­cial me­dia net­work­ing strat­egy than on tech­nol­ogy. It’s less about ‘where to click’ and more about ‘why to click.’ It’s less about ‘how to cir­cle’ and more about ‘who to circle.’

We’ll start with an in­tro­duc­tion to the cir­cle man­age­ment page, and then fol­low up with the best tips how to or­ga­nize your cir­cles, set­ting busi­ness goals, who to con­nect with, and how to find these people.

Cir­cle Management

You’ll find the page for cir­cle man­age­ment by click­ing ’Peo­ple‘ in the left hand menu, and then click­ing ‘Your cir­cles’ in the top menu.

You can al­soac­cess your cir­cles page by go­ing to this URL: https://plus.google.com/circles

A list with all your cir­cles will open. Once you click one of the cir­cles, the up­per part of the screen will show you all mem­bers of this circle. 

How To Name Circles?

Here are some ideas how to name your cir­cles sys­tem­at­i­cally. I’m sure you’ll come up with your own ‘nam­ing sys­tem’ while work­ing with circles.

Use Short Cir­cle Names.

A few weeks ago I had sev­eral long names like:

Blog­gers of G+ v1

Blog­gers of G+ v2

Blog­gers of G+ v3

The prob­lem was, on my cir­cle man­age­ment page they showed up like this:

Blog­gers o

Blog­gers o

Blog­gers o

I had no way to see which was which!

I’ve since cho­sen to use shorter cir­cle names. You can see them in the screen­shot above.

Prepend Cir­cle Names With Meta Info.

That sounds weird, I know!

It’s like sort­ing sev­eral cir­cles to­gether into cat­e­gories or groups.

I put my own shared cir­cles to­gether in one cat­e­gory. I put other people’s cir­cles that I added in one cat­e­gory. And so on…

To cat­e­go­rize I prepend cir­cle names with a pre­fix that shows me what type of cir­cle it is. I will also sort these cir­cles to­gether on the cir­cle man­age­ment page. You can re­order cir­cles with drag and drop.

Some ex­am­ples:

When I add other people’s shared cir­cles, the cir­cle name starts with SC fol­lowed by the name from whom I got the cir­cle, or by the date – in case I com­bined peo­ple from sev­eral circles.

SC Robby Ball

SC Feb 28

All my cir­cles re­lated to our com­mu­nity Blog­gers of Google Plus start with the pre­fix BoG+. You can do the same when build­ing your tribe.

BoG+ v1

BoG+ Com­mu­nity

You could also sep­a­rate pri­vate and busi­ness cir­cles by adding B or P.

B VIPs

B Prospects

B Clients

P Funny

P Friends

P Pho­tog­ra­phy

The Cir­cle Man­age­ment Page

The top of the page shows all peo­ple you’ve cir­cled. The bot­tom shows all your circles.

#1 – This is what a cir­cle looks like when you hover over the cir­cle icon.

#2 – This is what the cir­cle looks like af­ter you clicked it. The up­per part of the page will now show only the peo­ple in­side this circle.

#3 - This is the ‘nor­mal’ state of cir­cles listed on your cir­cle man­age­ment page.

You can click the icons within the cir­cle icon to

• edit the cir­cle name ,
• share the cir­cle to pub­lic, to se­lected cir­cles, or to the mem­bers of the cir­cle itself ,
• and to delete the circle .

How To Set No­ti­fi­ca­tions And Menu Or­der For Circles

If you want to know more about man­ag­ing cir­cles, check out this video by Mark Vang.

How to set no­ti­fi­ca­tions and menu or­der for Google+ circles.

What Are Rea­son­able Busi­ness Goals For Mar­ket­ing On Google Plus And Mas­ter­ing Circles?

Be­fore you start fill­ing your cir­cles, be clear about your busi­ness goals on g+. What can your rea­son­ably ex­pect to ac­com­plish? How does your spe­cific goal gov­ern the spe­cific cir­cle strat­egy you use to con­nect with people?

I’ll es­tab­lish 6 busi­ness and mar­ket­ing goals, and through­out the ar­ti­cle we’ll keep com­ing back to those goals, and see which cir­cle strat­egy is best for which goal.

1. Build­ing your au­thor­ity or brand.
2. Build­ing so­cial proof.
3. Con­nect­ing to po­ten­tial clients.
4. Keep­ing in touch with ex­ist­ing clients.
5. Con­nect­ing with niche peers.
6. Con­nect­ing with influencers.

When I talk about ‘clients’ I al­ways mean ‘cus­tomers’ as well. I use ‘clients’ more of­ten be­cause a lot of my read­ers are agency own­ers, con­sul­tants or freelancers.

Goal 1: Build­ing your au­thor­ity or brand.

Build­ing your au­thor­ity means shap­ing what you stand for , or what the brand stands for .

The more peo­ple view you as the go-to-per­­son for a given topic, the eas­ier it is for you to get new clients. Higher au­thor­ity means more clients and higher prices.

Peo­ple as well as search en­gines and in­flu­ence mea­sure­ment tools judge your top­i­cal au­thor­ity based on 2 things:

• What con­tent are you posting?
• Who do you con­nect with? 

The more you fo­cus on your niche with both points, the eas­ier it is for peo­ple to put you into the match­ing busi­ness cat­e­gory in­side their heads.

On Google Plus, more than on other net­works, there are peo­ple who present them­selves as au­thor­i­ties in a given niche, but when you read their stream, you have a hard time find­ing out what niche they stand for. Their con­tent is all cats and ba­con, an­i­mated gifs, and stun­ning im­ages of nature.

They have cho­sen to go for pop­u­lar­ity by post­ing vi­ral con­tent that is NOT re­lated to their ac­tual busi­ness or niche. Vi­ral con­tent is great for be­ing seen as a like­able and pop­u­lar per­son. But it does not es­tab­lish you as an ex­pert in your field.

If you were to hire an ex­pert with an hourly rate of $ 1,500 to help you, in whom would you make this investment?

1. Would you hire the self-pro­­claimed ex­pert who posts top­i­cally ir­rel­e­vant, funny and en­ter­tain­ing stuff all day?
2. Or would you hire the in­dus­try thought-leader who stays on-topic and pub­lishes help­ful, in­sight­ful, and re­spected con­tent in her area of expertise?

Here are 3 so­cial me­dia ex­perts com­bin­ing highly rel­e­vant con­tent with enor­mous like­abil­ity. They rarely post off-topic, prob­a­bly 10%. Use them as role model for ex­cel­lent po­si­tion­ing and networking.

I’d love to give you ex­am­ples for #1, but ob­vi­ously I’d hurt people’s rep­u­ta­tion. Highly mo­ti­vated, like­able peo­ple – but they fail to po­si­tion them­selves as full time ex­pert. They value ‘pop­u­lar’ posts higher than rel­e­vant posts. They fo­cus too much on like­abil­ity, and not enough on show­cas­ing their expertise.

For the goal of build­ing your au­thor­ity and in­flu­ence, fo­cus your con­tent and the peo­ple you add to your cir­cles al­most ex­clu­sively on your area of ex­per­tise! To in­crease like­abil­ity while be­ing rel­e­vant, fo­cus on re­la­tion­ships in­stead of post­ing cats and bacon.

 

Goal 2: Build­ing so­cial proof.

In­creas­ing so­cial proof in the con­text of so­cial me­dia means: in­creas­ing van­ity met­rics. Hav­ing lots of fol­low­ers makes you look suc­cess­ful. Lots of plus-ones and com­ments also in­crease per­ceived success.

Some peo­ple crit­i­cize van­ity met­rics as be­ing unim­por­tant and mean­ing­less, and they cor­rectly say that van­ity met­rics can be gamed.

I agree that a fol­lower count is no true mea­sure of im­por­tance, in­flu­ence, or authority.

But here’s a psy­cho­log­i­cal fact: A pro­file with high van­ity met­rics at first glance looks more im­pres­sive than one with low numbers.

The av­er­age per­son to­tally falls for that!

This is why some mar­keters use large cir­cle shares to in­crease their fol­lower count quickly. Be­low you can see how my fol­lower count started to in­crease once I joined cir­cle shares. The #1 tool to gain Google plus fol­low­ers fast is the chain-letter-circle-share.

Boost­ing fol­low­ers comes with a price, though.

As your pop­u­lar­ity in­creases, your in­flu­ence goes down.

The more you push to in­crease fol­lower count, the more the av­er­age en­gage­ment per per­son goes down.

It takes A LOT OF WORK to get many fol­low­ers fast, and in­crease mean­ing­ful en­gage­ment at the same time. The work is not hard, it’s ac­tu­ally fun, but lots and lots of hours go into it. It’s the most time con­sum­ing mar­ket­ing task I’ve known in 27 years of do­ing business.

I chose Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitz­patrick to il­lus­trate the ‘in­flu­ence para­dox.’ Guy is THE per­fect ex­am­ple to show that cast­ing a wide net and amass­ing un­tar­geted fol­low­ers re­sults in rel­a­tively low in­flu­ence per follower.

It’s a sim­pli­fied ex­am­ple – many fac­tors come into play be­yond the mere num­ber of fol­low­ers. For the pur­pose of cir­cle man­age­ment re­mem­ber this: It’s easy to be in­flu­en­tial in a small group, it gets harder, the larger the group of fol­low­ers is.

De­spite the low en­gage­ment Guy cer­tainly is one of the most in­flu­en­tial peo­ple in the so­cial me­dia sphere. An­a­lyz­ing why, and how this fits to­gether with the low g+ en­gage­ment is be­yond the scope of this blog post.

The screen be­low shows Google’s search re­sults page for “Guy Kawasaki.” 

1. Did you ever no­tice Google of­fers the op­tion to add peo­ple to your cir­cles even on search re­sults pages? Any­body still think­ing G+ will fail?

2. The proof is in the num­bers! An­nounc­ing 5,829,695 fol­low­ers next to your name is im­pres­sive. That’s why strate­gies to in­crease fol­lower count DO have their place in marketing.

Pause For A Mo­ment To Re­flect What You Just Read: The Clash Of Concepts!

I spent more time on these 2 goals than on the next 4, be­cause they are the core of your so­cial me­dia pres­ence.

Net­work­ing on so­cial me­dia is a clash of 2 con­cepts – go­ing for max peo­ple and max reach, or go­ing for top­i­cal fo­cus, less peo­ple, and higher in­flu­ence per person.

These 2 goals de­fine your brand­ing, how you po­si­tion your­self. The next 4 goals are about net­work­ing with people.

Goal 3: Con­nect­ing to po­ten­tial clients.

This goes well with goal #1 above. Peo­ple find you as au­thor­ity in a given topic, fol­low you, and the more of­ten they get in con­tact with your fo­cused con­tent, the more likely they are to con­sider your ser­vices or products.

Your cir­cle strat­egy here is to pub­lish and be part in niche or topic fo­cused cir­cles. That way you’ll be seen as con­nected to that niche or topic.

To then ac­tu­ally find and net­work with po­ten­tial clients, you’ll want to cir­cle those who in­ter­act with con­tent rel­e­vant to your busi­ness. I’m not pri­mar­ily talk­ing about cir­cle shares here. What I mean is: cir­cle peo­ple who’ve shown in­ter­est in your top­ics, and start net­work­ing with them.

You can find those peo­ple who in­ter­act with your own posts, or who in­ter­act with rel­e­vant posts on other people’s pro­files, and in communities.

Once you fill your cir­cles with po­ten­tial prospects, you need a plan how to find and en­gage those who are most likely to be­come customers.

Goal 4: Keep­ing in touch with ex­ist­ing clients.

Con­nect­ing with ex­ist­ing clients is one of the eas­i­est and one of the most un­der­used ben­e­fits of so­cial net­work­ing sites like Face­book or Google Plus.

Un­less you sourced your client on g+ in the first place, you’ll prob­a­bly have a hard time con­nect­ing to them here. They are more likely to be ac­tive on Face­book, In­sta­gram, or Pinterest.

If you DO have clients on G+, putting them in a spe­cial cus­tomer’s cir­cle is the smartest thing to do!

Goal 5: Con­nect­ing with niche peers.

When I en­tered busi­ness al­most 3 decades ago, what I just called ‘niche peers,’ was aptly called ‘com­peti­tors’.

It’s one of the most en­joy­able as­pects of so­cial me­dia marketing:

Peo­ple work­ing in the same in­dus­try, com­pet­ing for the same cus­tomer base, are now form­ing strong bonds, sup­port­ing each other fear­lessly. Com­peti­tors even build busi­ness joined ven­tures through so­cial media.

The 21^st cen­tury re­places com­pe­ti­tion with cooperation.

And you’ll find lots of it on Google Plus!

A word of caution …

While you en­joy talk­ing with your peers on so­cial me­dia, don’t for­get to con­nect to po­ten­tial clients. On so­cial net­works it’s easy to get car­ried away and spent time on the less im­por­tant ac­tiv­i­ties – like chat­ting with fel­low busi­ness own­ers in­stead of mar­ket­ing to your po­ten­tial customers.

For most mar­kets you should keep in­dus­try peers and prospects in sep­a­rate cir­cles. There are some ‘in­ces­tu­ous’ mar­kets, how­ever, where peers and cus­tomers are the same peo­ple. That makes net­work­ing so much eas­ier! For example,

• So­cial me­dia con­sul­tants sell­ing so­cial me­dia pro­grams to so­cial me­dia consultants.
• Make-money-on­­line gu­rus sell­ing make-money-on­­line ad­vice to the peo­ple who also want to make money by sell­ing make-money-on­­line advice.

Hi­lar­i­ous!

So, stay aware who in your net­work is a po­ten­tial cus­tomer, and who ‘peer’ only.

Goal 6: Con­nect­ing with influencers.

In re­cent years an en­tire in­dus­try was born with just 1 goal: to con­nect brands to influencers.

Here are 3 rea­sons why you want to con­nect your busi­ness to influencers:

1. For busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties / joint ventures.
2. To get your busi­ness in front of their audience.
3. To be­come an in­flu­encer your­self, if you aren’t yet.

In­flu­encer mar­ket­ing agen­cies and in­flu­ence mea­sure­ment tools are mak­ing good money by help­ing brands to take ad­van­tage of in­flu­encers. Like with any young in­dus­try, we’re see­ing some stu­pid de­vel­op­ments, and un­re­al­is­tic expectations.

On so­cial me­dia, you can do the work of find­ing and net­work­ing with in­flu­encers your­self. Nat­u­rally, the rel­e­vant in­flu­encers are a small sub-group of ‘in­dus­try peers’ men­tioned in goal #5 above.

• Most in­flu­encers built their in­flu­ence on ex­per­tise and strong con­tent. They have pub­lished books, built a ma­jor blog, or writ­ten blog posts on high pro­file web sites. They are speak­ers on in­dus­try con­fer­ences. Those are the pop­u­lar peo­ple in your niche. They are the gu­rus, su­per stars, thought leaders.
• Some are pri­mar­ily net­work­ers and con­nec­tors and deal bro­kers. They might be less pop­u­lar, but they are in touch with many big play­ers in your industry.

It’s a good idea to have 1 cir­cle with the most im­por­tant peo­ple in your industry.

How To Buil Your Cir­cles For Busi­ness? And Who To Add?

Let’s start fill­ing your cir­cles with rel­e­vant people.

1. De­cide which of the above busi­ness goals are most im­por­tant to you. I know you love them all, but try­ing to make them all work at once will re­quire in­sane amounts of time.
2. Based on your goals, de­cide which kind of peo­ple you need to find for your circles.
3. Cre­ate empty cir­cles with ap­pro­pri­ate cir­cle names.
4. Start search­ing for peo­ple and add them to your circles.

Over time you will find out your very own cir­cle style. To get you started, here are some sug­gested circles.

• Cus­tomers.
• Prospects.
• Niche Ex­perts (peers).
• Niche VIPs (in­flu­encers)

Iden­ti­fy­ing The Most Likely Prospects

A prospects cir­cle can be fur­ther bro­ken down into sev­eral cir­cles based on how in­tensely some­one is fol­low­ing and in­ter­act­ing with you.

1. Fol­low­ers (no en­gage­ment yet, tiny like­li­hood of be­com­ing a customer)
2. En­gagers (Low qual­ity or in­fre­quent interactions.)
3. Fans (High qual­ity, or high fre­quency engagers)

For the 2 en­gagers cir­cles (en­gagers & fans) add only peo­ple who in­ter­act on rel­e­vant posts. If some­one shares or com­ments on funny gifs you posted, this does NOT in­di­cate she’s in­ter­ested in your busi­ness topics.

What do I mean by low and high qual­ity engagement?

Low qual­ity means lit­tle en­gage­ment ef­fort on the part of the follower. 

• A plus one.
• A very short com­ment, like ‘great post.’
• Shar­ing your post with­out adding an introduction.

High qual­ity means the fol­lower makes the ef­fort to re­flect on your content.

• A com­ment that adds thoughts to your post’s topic.
• Shar­ing and adding a mean­ing­ful in­tro­duc­tion to the share post. Here, too, ‘A great post by xyz’ does not es­tab­lish a high value introduction.

Find Your Prospects From Other So­cial Me­dia Sites On Google Plus.

An im­por­tant point in in­creas­ing top-of-mind-aware­­ness is get­ting in front of your cus­tomers more of­ten. That’s why it’s worth the ef­fort to con­nect to your prospects on sev­eral platforms.

Here are 3 groups you might want to add to your prospects circles.

1. Your email subscribers.
2. Your blog commenters.
3. Im­por­tant con­tacts from your other so­cial me­dia platforms.

Iden­tify Your In­flu­encers And Multipliers

The in­flu­encer cir­cle can also be bro­ken down into 2 circles.

• In­dus­try ex­perts, thought lead­ers, authorities.
• Mul­ti­pli­ers (Power Shar­ers / Ripplers)

And in­dus­try ex­perts cir­cle can con­tain peo­ple who are rec­og­nized ex­perts, no mat­ter how ac­tive they are on Google Plus.

Mul­ti­pli­ers are peo­ple with high in­flu­ence on Google Plus. The next sec­tion of this cir­cle tu­to­r­ial shows you how to find the most pow­er­ful G+ influencers.

The Power Of A Ripple

Find­ing the in­flu­encers is the most re­ward­ing work you can do on Google Plus.

To do that, you’ll use a tool called ‘Rip­ples.’

The Rip­ples Tool is a page on Google Plus that an­swers 3 cru­cial questions:

1. Who has re-shared a G+ post on G+?
2. Who has shared a web URL to G+?
3. Who cre­ated the most re-shares for any given post or web URL?

Let that sink in for a moment.

Us­ing Rip­ples you can find the shar­ers for ANY Google Plus post AND the shares for ANY web page on the internet.

You’ll get in­flu­encer in­for­ma­tion not only for your con­tent, but for any­body’s content!

This is pow­er­ful stuff!

AND you can find who has the power to cre­ate LOTS OF RE-SHARES for you.

How cool is that?

There are a few more fancy fea­tures in the tool, but what counts are the 3 ques­tions listed above.

Rip­ples is the fea­ture that truly sets Google Plus apart from other so­cial sites, in terms of net­work­ing. It’s an in­flu­ence mea­sure­ment tool for each and every post on Google Plus.

Here you can see the Rip­ples for a shared-cir­­cle-post of David Leon­hardt. In this ex­am­ple I am an in­ter­est­ing ‘in­flu­encer’ for David, be­cause I cre­ated lots of re-shares.

How Ex­actly Do You Use Rip­ples To Fill Your Circles?

• Find peo­ple who have shared your blog posts to Google Plus.
  VERY FEW blog­gers ac­tu­ally track who shares their posts.
  The shar­ers are your most im­por­tant supporters!
• Find peo­ple who have shared your G+ posts, and es­pe­cially those who cre­ated many re-shares. 
• Find peo­ple who shared rel­e­vant posts from your niche peers, and cre­ated rip­ples for them.
  They might as well cre­ate rip­ples for your posts, once they get to know you.

There’s even more: in com­bi­na­tion with the cir­cle man­age­ment tool Cir­clo­scope you can ex­port ex­actly who plussed, shared, or com­mented on your G+ posts. Or you can add plussers, com­menters, and shar­ers to circles.

How to find Rip­ples for a Google Plus post.

Hover over the post. At the top right, click the drop down ar­row and chose ‘View Rip­ples.’ The Rip­ples page will open.

How to find Rip­ples for a web URL, for ex­am­ple blog post.

Use this URL ex­am­ple and re­place WEBADDRESS with the ac­tual web site URL:

https://plus.google.com/ripple/details?url=WEBADDRESS

Work­ing ex­am­ple, show­ing you the Rip­ples for the blog post you are read­ing right now:

https://plus.google.com/ripple/details?url=http://ralfskirr.com/google-plus-circles-tutorial-for-business

8 Ways To Find Peo­ple To Circle

1. Visit rel­e­vant posts and see who en­gages with the post.
2. Visit pro­files of rel­e­vant peo­ple, scroll through their stream and see who they in­ter­act with.
3. Search for match­ing communities.
4. Search For Rel­e­vant Shared Circles.
5. Use Google Plus Search.
6. Browse Google Plus Explore.
7. Check out Google’s Sug­gested User List.
8. Search on Circlecount.com.

1. Visit rel­e­vant Google Plus posts and see who en­gages with the post.

A rel­e­vant post is a post on your topic, tar­geted at the same peo­ple that you want as client. Ide­ally a more in-depth post.

Once you open a rel­e­vant post on Google Plus, you can check who re­sponded to the post. Peo­ple who left thought­ful com­ments are in­ter­est­ing for you.

To find in­flu­encers, check the rip­ples of the post. Shar­ers who cre­ated lots of re-shares for this post, might also cre­ate shares for your posts - once you are con­nected to them!

2. Visit pro­files of rel­e­vant peo­ple, scroll through their stream and see who they in­ter­act with.

You prob­a­bly al­ready know some peo­ple in your in­dus­try. Visit their pro­files and check their contacts:

• Who do they men­tion in their posts?
• Whose con­tent (from Google Plus, not from out­side blogs) do they share?
• Who com­ments on their posts?
• Who shares their posts?

3. Search for match­ing communities.

Join com­mu­ni­ties and check who are the own­ers, the mods, and the most ac­tive users. If you’re re­ally lazy, only add those who OWN com­mu­ni­ties re­lated to your topic. That they cre­ated the com­mu­nity is proof that they are po­si­tion­ing them­selves in that area.

Most com­mu­ni­ties on G+ are dead, or they are link grave­yards. Don’t bother join­ing those. Fo­cus on com­mu­ni­ties with ac­tual engagement.

4. Search For And Add Rel­e­vant Shared Circles.

Adding shared cir­cles is one of the fastest ways to find in­ter­est­ing peo­ple. You can bulk add up to 500 peo­ple from a shared circle.

Why is bulk adding peo­ple a good way to find rel­e­vant people?

Imag­ine you’d only search for peo­ple by vist­ing pro­files 1 by 1. Some peo­ple rec­om­mend you should do this.

The BIG PROBLEM is: 90% of Google Plus ac­count hold­ers are in­ac­tive. You go to their pro­file, only to find it’s dead. Google is even stu­pid enough to fre­quently sug­gest users to cir­cle who haven’t posted a sin­gle post to their pro­file. Or who stopped post­ing 2 years ago.

So you’d visit a lot of dead pro­files which needs a lot of time.

When adding a shared cir­cle in­stead, at first you don’t go to pro­files, you only watch the stream of the circle.

The stream ob­vi­ously only shows ac­tive users! The in­ac­tive peo­ple never show up.

5. Use Google Plus Search.

The search bar is at the top of each Google Plus page.

Search for peo­ple, key­words or hashtags.

6. Browse Google Plus Explore.

Click through the rel­e­vant cat­e­gories and check for rel­e­vant posts. From those click through to the poster and check their profile.

To learn what type of con­tent goes vi­ral, click ‘What’s hot.’

To ac­cess Ex­plore, click ‘Home’ in the menu on the left, then click ‘Ex­plore’ in the top menu.

7. Check out Google’s Sug­gested User List.

When you sign up for Google Plus, Google will sug­gest a list with users from sev­eral cat­e­gories for you to fol­low. You can ac­cess the Sug­gested User List any­time at:

https://plus.google.com/getstarted/follow

Click­ing at ar­row #1 will open a popup where you can se­lect peo­ple to add to your circles.

Click­ing at ar­row #2 will add all the sug­gested users from this cat­e­gory to your circles.

8. Search on CircleCount.com.

On Cir­cle­Count you can ac­cess tons of in­for­ma­tion for 25,634,902 Google Plus users. To find rel­e­vant peo­ple for your topic, use the tags at the top of the page, right next to the lan­guage chooser.

For your own cir­cle man­age­ment it is im­por­tant that you con­nect your Google Plus ac­count to CircleCount.com. I’ll cover this in more de­tail in part II of this post.

Now you have sev­eral cir­cles rel­e­vant for your busi­ness. Start in­ter­act­ing with peo­ple, start build­ing relationships.

One Tool To Rule Them All: Circloscope

There are about half a dozen tools avail­able for Google Plus.

The one you can’t live with­out is Cir­clo­scope. Se­ri­ously, there is no way to use Google Plus for busi­ness with­out us­ing Circloscope.

Cir­clo­scope is an ex­ten­sion for the Chrome browser, and it’s a tool for cir­cle management.

These are the Cir­clo­scope features:

• Add peo­ple to your cir­cles in mass
• Re­move peo­ple from your cir­cles in mass
• Ex­port peo­ple in­for­ma­tion to CSV format

• Get the list of peo­ple in your circles
• Get the list of your followers
• Get the list of in­ac­tive Google+ users in your cir­cles (i.e. in­ac­tive in the last X days)
• Get the list of peo­ple in your cir­cles who fol­low / don’t fol­low back
• Get the list of du­pli­cates (peo­ple in 2 or more cir­cles of yours)
• Get the list of most rel­e­vant peo­ple in your circles
• Get the list of mem­bers from any community
• Get the list of peo­ple who have re-shared a post
• Get the list of peo­ple who have +1’d a post
• Get the list of peo­ple who have com­mented on a post
• Get the list of peo­ple in a shared circle
• Im­port the list of Google+ users from a web page (e.g. circlecount.com)
• Search the lists by name, email, lo­ca­tion, ed­u­ca­tion, em­ploy­ment, etc
• Include/exclude some of your cir­cles from var­i­ous lists
• Pro­file and Page ac­counts supported!

Cir­clo­scope is about to get a MAJOR Facelift soon. Once up­dated it will be com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the cur­rent ver­sion, so there’s lit­tle use in adding an ex­ten­sive how-to-use-cir­­clo­s­cope to­day. I will add that once the new Cir­clo­scope has been published.

You can see a pre­view of the up­com­ing Cir­clo­scope in the video below.

RECAP: What We’ve Cov­ered In This Post

• You’ve learned what G+ cir­cles are, how to cre­ate, re­name, and re­order them on the cir­cle man­age­ment page.
• You’ve got some ideas how to name and cat­e­go­rize circles.

Busi­ness Goals For Be­ing On Google Plus?

1. Build­ing your au­thor­ity or brand.
2. Build­ing so­cial proof.
3. Con­nect to po­ten­tial clients.
4. Keep in touch with ex­ist­ing clients.
5. Con­nect with niche peers.
6. Con­nect with influencers.

Who To Cir­cle?

• Cus­tomers
• Prospects
  • Fol­low­ers
  • En­gagers
  • Fans
  • Your email subscribers
  • Your blog commenters
  • So­cial me­dia contacts
• In­dus­try peers 
  • Niche Ex­perts
  • In­flu­encers

8 Ways To Find Peo­ple To Cir­cle?

1. Visit rel­e­vant posts and find engagers.
2. Visit pro­files of in­dus­try peers.
3. Search for match­ing communities.
4.  Search for rel­e­vant shared sircles.
5. Use Google Plus search.
6. Browse Google Plus Explore.
7. Check out Google’s Sug­gested User List.
8. Search on Circlecount.com.

Tools

• Google Plus Ripples 
  • Find Shar­ers And Influencers
  • Who has shared a G+ post on G+?
  • Who has shared a web URL on G+?
  • Who cre­ated the most re-shares?
• Cir­clo­scope
  • Pow­er­ful Cir­cle Management
  • Find and re­move in­ac­tive people.
  • Cre­ate shared cir­cles in minutes.
  • Add and re­move peo­ple in bulk.
• Cir­cle­count
  • Cir­cle And Pro­file Statistics
  • Rank­ings for peo­ple and pages.
  • Your con­nec­tions.
  • Your Shared Circles.

This Is Part 1 Of A 2 Part Cir­­cles-For-Busi­­ness Tutorial.

Part 2 is about ‘How To Mas­ter Shared Cir­cles.’

I’m also prepar­ing a se­ries of Google Plus Posts ti­tled ‘Cir­cle Mas­tery.’

To stay up­dated add me to your circles!

Now It’s Your Turn …

What are your tips for Google Plus For Business?
What are your questions?
Should I add any­thing to this tutorial?

Let us know in the com­ments below.