• Start by creating a business page. Companies who wish to showcase the various facets of their business, their brand, products or services can attach up to 50 business pages to one Gmail address.
• Maximize the use of cover photos. Bigger and better is the name of the game when it comes to this. Google+ allows up to 16”x9” or 2,120 pixels wide for cover images.
• Use Google+ links since these are indexed by Google and are useful for boosting SEO and a brand’s visibility. Also, be sure to link social media profiles and the company’s website.
• Use a key-word optimized bio. Explain what the company is about—what are its services and products. Use bullet points for easier skimming.
• Add people to Circles as a way of expanding a business’ reach.
• Don’t be afraid to label Circles. Using one mega circle for a brand may be simple but it’s not exactly very optimal for business. Separate connections into categories.
• Create a posting strategy. Google+ allows its users to share content to specific groups. This makes for a great content marketing strategy.
• Increase the brand’s searchability through the use of hashtags.
• Tag people especially those who are relevant to the content that the company is sharing. This opens up the possibility for creating buzz and starting conversations.
• Google+ has no character limit when it comes to posts. This means that users can share posts or varied lengths. This helps in shaking things up a bit and allows users to be more flexible when it comes to the information that they are sharing to their Circles.
• Utilize Google+’s built-in formatting options to catch the attention of the people in a brand’s network.
• Share PDF, Word documents, and other downloadable files on Google+. This is especially useful for content marketing since companies can share long form content directly on the social networking site.
• Utilize the Events option. This is a great opportunity for companies to establish conversations about their products and services. Invited parties are notified via email. What’s more, guests can also upload images to the event page afterwards.
• Make the most out of Hangouts. This function is more than just a video chatting service. It allows brand owners to have remote meetings with colleagues, prospects, or customers practically for free.
• Expand a brand’s content portfolio through recording hangouts.
• Interact with the people in a brand’s community. Be sure to 1+ interesting posts.
• Business owners will benefit from Guy Kawasaki’s What the Plus. It shares pro tips about how to be brilliant in Google+.
• Be sure to join G+ communities to expand a brand’s network and to share content with others.
• Use long-tail keywords in post titles to help in SEO.

The slowly disappearing line of demarcation between advertising and content publishing has resulted in a paradigm shift where brands are becoming their own publishers. This means that they are the ones who produce and distribute content that are appealing to the brand’s target audience. This implies that there must be a balance between original and repurposed content delivered at the right time and at the right number, and does not deliberately sell a company’s products and services.

Meeting the above-mentioned standards may seem to involve too much work and in a way, it does. However, there is a guide for brands that will allow them to figure out what kind of content to create for maximum benefit and that is the Content Marketing Pyramid.

Utilizing the gastronomic analogy earlier, the content marketing pyramid can be likened to the food pyramid. It illustrates the various kinds of content that brands can use for their marketing campaign arranged according to how easy it is to produce or acquire and how much of it is required.

At the bottom of the pyramid is curated content or information from other reliable sources. Such pieces of content are the foundation of a content marketing campaign and must be used as much as possible not only because it is the easiest to find but also generates a lot of buzz  These can be easily shared on various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

The second level consists if short form blog posts and website content. These can be scheduled twice a week and can tackle issues that the audience will find relevant. These can also be in the form of commentary or reviews.

The third level consists of infographics, webinars, and presentations. These are information-rich content presented in concise formats.

The fourth level belongs to white papers and eBooks. These typically take longer to create since a lot of research is involved. This kind of content looks deep into relevant topics and is typically downloadable.

The last level of the pyramid consists of published books. These are the most expensive to produce and also take the most amount of time to accomplish.

Knowing the components of the content marketing pyramid is not enough. Brands need to know how to streamline content in order to garner the biggest benefits. It begins by curating content in their area of interest. Some of these pieces, however, may leave voids since readers are likely to ask questions. These inquiries can be answered through blog posts but make sure to link to the original content. From comments on these blog posts, topics for webinars and infographics can be generated. These webinars can in turn be translated into eBooks or white papers.

Establishing a presence and proactively using Google+ for content marketing has advantages over its competitors like Facebook and Twitter. For one, it increases a brand’s ranking on Google’s search engine results. Also, it can be easily integrated with various other Google applications which allow businesses to show up on Google Local and Google map thereby optimizing its online visibility and promoting user engagement through customer reviews. Finally, it allows brand owners to monitor how their content is shared and viewed through Google Analytics.

It also does help that there is close to 100 million users in this social network which makes it an ideal place to find potentially loyal customers.

Maximizing G+

Leveraging Google+ for content marketing may seem like a daunting task. However, there are simple ways to make the most out of this social network when using it as a platform for content marketing campaigns. Below are some tips that business owners may fine useful:

• Smart Formatting

Always make sure to make post titles bold. This also rings true for important lines or word in the body of the content.

• @Mentions and Hashtags

Tagging people and even following pages in posts can foster engagement and interaction. Brands must also respond to +mentions whenever possible to further foster discussions. Moreover, hashtags increase the visibility of posts making it easier to spot among the content pool on G+.

• Use Photos

Pictures catch people’s attention and viral images give posts a chance to get extra reshares.

• Reshare Successful Posts.

Look for content in the archives that have successfully garnered likes and shares. People are more likely to get interested in content that have received commendations from fellow users since they consider them relevant.

• Share Targeted Content

Leverage the Circles function of Google+ and notify relevant ones regarding important updates. Segmenting circles is a great way to push targeted content.

• Be Interesting and Engaging

Content marketing is all about giving high quality and relevant information. This means that brands need to focus on publishing and marketing pieces of information that their target audience will find useful. Valuable, interesting, and engaging piece of content persuades customers to give their loyalty to a brand.

Conclusion

Google+ plays a vital role in content marketing. For brands, this means that they will have a platform not only to promote their products and services but also a channel to tell their story, share their expertise, and to build a trusting and loyal community.

As opposed to traditional marketing strategies that tend to distract the audience, content marketing is focused on communicating with existing and potential customers. It aims to deliver “consistent, ongoing, and valuable information” to gain consumer loyalty.

For the most part, traditional means of promoting businesses can only hold the audience’s attention for a short time. No matter how catchy commercials, posters, and other advertisements can be, their retention rate is still low. This is why companies have to come up with new gimmicks every time. On the other hand, since content marketing offers value to customers, they are more likely to retain the information they get and, more importantly, they are more likely to become loyal and paying customers for the brand.

Also, traditional publicity tends to be more expensive especially if a campaign flops. Whereas, content marketing can be relatively cheap since information can be presented as blog posts, Youtube videos, or graphics. Additionally, rolling out content need not be as costly as typical ads since these can be published in company websites and social networking sites.

Brand owners need to remember that marketing their products and services is impossible without killer content and that the best way to attract the attention of their client base is through utilizing multimedia formats.

Sprout Social is a management and engagement platform that is useful for businesses that market via sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and the like. It fosters exceptional brand experience through a collaborative environment that ensures smarter, faster, and more efficient social communications. It goes beyond their mantra of ‘Engage, Publish, and Analyze”. Through Sprout Social, a brand’s followers can turn into its most loyal customers.

Brands like AMD, Nokia, McDonald’s, Pepsi, UPS, White Echo, Fender, Yahoo, Yammer, and Red Mango have loved Sprout since day one because of these features:

• Unified Smart Inbox to streamline engagement
• Social CRM tools including shared customer records
• Advanced scheduling & publishing tools including ViralPost™
• Sophisticated analytics & unlimited custom reports
• Customer support features like tasks and Helpdesk integration
• Team collaboration tools including live activity updates

Try Sprout Social risk-free from 30 days. Visit http://sproutsocial.com for more information.

Facebook has shared the following tips on how brand owners can get the most out of the revamped newsfeed:

• Think about your visuals: We’ve seen that users respond better to more visual stories in News Feed, from both people and pages. Now businesses have an even more visually rich way to showcase content.
• Get discovered with “following”: Thanks to a new “following” feed on the right-hand side of the home page, people will be able to discover more content from the pages they like and the people they follow. Stories shown in “following” are shown in chronological order, so public figures and pages have a place where users can see everything they publish.
• Make sure your cover photo tells your story: For both organic and paid page like stories, the photo that will be displayed is the page’s cover photo. This change is designed to provide more context about the page, so make sure the photo is eye-catching and visually representative of your page.

This just goes to show that from a social media marketing stand point, visuals will be playing a more significant role on advertising now more than ever.

To use Twilert, users simply need to sign in with a Google or Twitter account, select the keywords that they would want to keep an eye on, and set how often the alerts will be sent to their inbox.

Some of the things that small businesses can keep tabs on include mentions of the company, organization or its products and services, tweets related to an industry, relevant articles, and even potential prospects. Moreover, users can also monitor via geo-location, by language, and specific links among a host of other filters.

Additionally, there are codes and commands that users can rely on to narrow their social media monitoring. This includes using quotation marks to bring back very specific results, using “OR” to monitor either or of a user’s keywords, use “-“to exclude specific terms, and using the “from:” or the “to:” command to monitor keywords from a specific user.

To get started on Twilert, visit http://www.twilert.com.

While Twitter is useful for placing carefully researched SEO keywords, it is good to remember that not all tweets are created equal. There are those that are titillating enough to get noticed by users and there are those that just get drowned under all the new tweets.

Top tweets that will get any customer base/fan base to engage with a brand should be or have any of the following:

Emotional— Business owners are being reminded all the time to put a human face on their social media accounts. This allows their followers to relate to the company better which potentially leads to better sales opportunities.

Photos— It has already been established that visual posts do better than plain text. These photo tweets can be a marketing poster or something more creative.

Articles— Articles that are relevant to a business or to its customers’ interests are always welcome on Twitter since it adds value to a brand’s services.

Conversational— The number one rule on any social networking site is engagement. Companies are encouraged to have conversations with their clients through Twitter. It could be an answer to a product query or a simple response to a product appreciation tweet.

According to the LinkedIn blog, this feature will work as follows:

• Begin by typing the name of a connection or a company in your status update box or a comment field on the Homepage
• Select someone from the list of your connections that appear in the drop-down, complete your status or comment and post it.
• The person or company you mentioned will receive a notification alerting them that they have been mentioned.

People can mention first-degree connections as well as other LinkedIn members that may not be in their network but are engaged in conversation in the comment sections of posts on the LinkedIn homepage. Through this, professionals easily discuss important matters regarding their business—they can even promote social marketing packages and similar services that they offer. They can also allow users to start conversations with their network easily while being able to respond to people who begin conversations with them in real time.

For more information, please visit www.linkedin.com.

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Users simply need to upload a video on their oneclick.com account, assign a title and multiple tags, and then decide on which social media sites the videos will be shared.

OneLoad has free and paid services that will suit every user’s needs. To find out more about their services and packages, please visit their website at http://www.oneload.com.