Google+
Have tried Google+ on your iPad yet? Complete rubbish eh? I find the Google+ experience on an iPad a bit like listening to local radio via the internet. Use the the radio! It works perfectly well. In the case of Google + they’ve HTML5’d it & mobile optimised it to the point of uselessness on an iPad. The customization of the UX for mobile devices from my perspective was totally unwarranted. If they had just left it alone and allowed people to use the same interface as the desktop it would have been fine. That’s what Facebook did. This is one of the main reasons I haven’t been on Google+ as much as I would have liked. I say “liked” because I really do enjoy it more than say Facebook. Alas, usually when I am at a desktop I am working. I will dip into FB more often on the desktop during the day if I need to comment or post something as it is pretty dull compared to Google+ where I tend to get stuck reading things.
Hopefully a new iPad experience is on its way. Any Android tablet users out there? Love to know your experience.
Google+ Changes.
Overnight Google opened up the doors to Google+ no invites needed. In addition they have made some great changes to video hangouts and also released the API for Hangouts, so expect to see a lot of innovation there. The change that caught my eye though was the addition of search to Google+. You can now search G+ posts, profiles & Sparks. Sparks is basically a combination of web results with a twist of freshness. Here are the 5 top things you need to do to get your post coming up in search.
The 5 steps to ranking in Google+
1. Get keywords in content – may seem obvious I know but don’t just link to a page and expect to be found. Give the page you are linking to some context, use your keywords.
2. Be worthy – your post has to be worthy of getting shares, +1 & comments. Generally the more of these you have the better. Within the G+ environment these things are hard to scam so your only real strategy here is to be worthy of sharing.
3. Google+ is big on the real time experience. Over time if no one is commenting or re-sharing your post it will fade from G+ search. Creating regular content within the G+ environment is what will get you found.
More details in this week’s video.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
