Google+ Tips for Newbies
OK, I have only been using Google+ for a couple of weeks, and I haven’t had the time to really play with it. However I’ve learnt a lot recently, so I thought it would be good to share my thoughts, especially as quite a few new people are either joining or migrating from other social media platforms.
The first thing to say is that this is NOT Facebook! It is very similar, but there are some big differences that you’ll need to get your head round. The main thing to understand are the circles.
Circles are a way of organising or grouping people you follow. You can use the ones Google give you- friends, family, following. But you can also create some more to help you. For example, I have created some extra ones- Geeks, Google, Musicians and Local (and some others). I put all the people I follow who might be interested in my techy/geeky posts in the Geeks circle, I put all the people who work at Google in the Google circle, musicians in the musicians circle and people who live near me in the local circle.
In some ways Google+ very like a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter.
With Twitter anyone can follow you and you don’t need to give your permission (although you can have a private profile or block someone from following you)
With Facebook you have to give permission for someone to follow you (or be “friends” with you)
With Google+ anyone can follow you (and you will be notified), but they will only see the public parts of your profile until you add them in to one of your circles. What they see in your profile, photos and your posts depends on the circle you have put them in.
My recommendation when using Google+ is not just to add your friends. It’s not Facebook. Put all your friends in the friends circle. But you can follow people you may not know personally and put these in one of your other circles. You don’t need to share all your personal information with them, but you can follow them and engage with them and share ideas. In this way, it’s kind of like Twitter. Its best to follow too many people to begin with. After a week or so, you’ll know who interests you and so you can prune the number of people you follow back a bit.
Add as much info as you can to your Google+ profile and then chose which bits of circles you are happy to view each bit of info. For example you could set your phone number to be viewable only by your Friends circle.
One thing that seems to be missing is a public circles feature. I don’t know what circles you have and which one I may or may not be in. That’s great, but it would be good to create a public circle (or group) that I could follow. For example a group of people who attend a particular church, or a fan group, or a group of musicians etc. Perhaps that will come!
But of course there is much more! You can +1 a post (pretty much like a Facebook _Like_) and you can share a post too.
I haven’t had the chance to try the Google Hangouts feature yet, but that is something that looks cool. Yes, facebook has a video chat feature now, but it’s purely one to one. Google Hangouts is group video chat with up to 10 people!
Then there is sparks which enables you to find topics of interest to you. More on this later.
Anyway, I hope you found that interesting. Be sure to +1 and/or share it if you do.
