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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Musings on successful presence and Google+ topics


The people you circle, what are you looking for there? If your friends are not yet on the Plus side, so what?

I started on Google+ with no-one I knew, even today only a handful of my friends are here.
I'm no techie or celebrity, just an ordinary middle-aged female from Finland. Love sharing my thoughts and  photographs, posting (hopefully) interesting content, engaging in conversations and helping out Goobies (newcomers). 




I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone. 
- Bill Cosby

The words from Bill Cosby have been my guideline on social media and blogs, I'm not a willing part of any popular clique, just been doing my thing all along.
If a nobody from a small country can achieve to be in so many circles (thank you, my dear Circleverse!), then anybody can. It just takes time, effort and perseverance. And posting in public, getting noticed.
Find your niche and be yourself, that's my advice.

In the course of really putting my mind into the platform I've started a handful of Google+ Pages, all aimed at helping others in different ways.

+Google+ Help is the most popular one, dishing out advice in English, aided by this blog.
+Gplussa is the same but in Finnish, I also have a blog to support that one.
+Finland - Suomi is a place where I promote my country without pay.

I have two Communities:

Google+ Helper Community
Suomi for the Finnish people

I still have some other ideas up my sleeve, waiting for the right moment... :-)
Why don't you have a go?  If you're passionate about something, create a Community.




Well, then, which circle is right for me?


Perhaps "Legally blonde non-geeks who are into Google+, writing, tech, edu, travel, scuba diving, golf, science and all kinds of interesting stuff."

Right. I'm difficult to circle and besides I post quite a lot, so many people have told me that they have just made a circle for me alone... Some have turned the 'circle volume' all the way up and some all the way down. :D

Isn't it great you can control my output, too? Without complaining of too many posts? I did a sort of survey once, if I post too much and the results are here.

Putting people in Circles is not easy, we tend to post about several topics and if you start to follow someone because of their Android -related posts, whoops! Here they are posting about their dive trip to Palau...
You can't categorize people or put them in compartments.
But as the person with multiple interests, you can collect the interested parties in one place, for instance your own Page.

Did you know that you can filter some of the uninteresting topics by hashtags, if only people used them more, I just wish!  Rarely do I see any political posts in my stream anymore as I've muted all the possible hashes for the upcoming elections in the US.


There is an app for it:  G+ Hashtags:


Find, mute or show the current hashtags in your stream and show in middle barGoogle+ Extension to find, mute or subscribe the current hashtags in your stream. The extension shows the hashtags in your Google+ stream in the middle bar (white bar). 

Hashtags are listed with counts and can be muted or subscribed. 
- Muting hashtags bans the hashtags from your stream, so you don't see the posts with these hashtags anymore. You can mute on or more hashtags. 
- Subscribing hashtags creates a unique stream with only posts that contain your subscribed hashtags. You can subscribe one or more hashtags. Muting and subscribing can be temporarily switched on or off to see the original stream or just the stream based on muted/subscribed hashtags.





What about the topics in posts?


What I’ve enjoyed most in Google+ is the lack of status updates like ‘I had an omelet for brekkies’ or ‘I became Mayor of Thingummybob in Be-Square’.
The standard of posts is very high, ranging from tech to religion, humor to science and all sorts of news. And cats.
But the best bulletins to me are various opinions that the Plussers write on almost any theme possible.

Don’t try to please anyone on Google+ but be yourself:


Write about the things that interest you, share links and videos that you find amusing or intriguing. Post stuff with good content, as that is what the public is looking for.


Don't pay too much attention to grammar or punctuation, remember there are always those who (if there's no other way to get your goat) will correct your spelling and not concentrate on your content. 
- I know, I post sometimes about grammar under the #GrammarFinn hash... :-) But just to give people a chance to learn about it. Not being able to use the apostrophe correctly doesn't mean one cannot write good stuff. Google+ is very international and we cannot all master the BBC English... 
Let all of the content and insights come out of your heart.




Google+ is what you make of it. 
- Jaana Nyström
This is the first platform where I've seen people think that "I post about the topics that interest ME" and not about stuff that they think might interest someone else or their readership. Google+ is honest in that way, especially when folks realize that they can just be themselves and that there are scores of others who think likewise.  An audience for everyone.

So: If you don't like what you see in your stream, the solution is very simple: UCM = UnCircle Me or the poster of your choice uninterest.

Do you have more thoughts about this, anything you'd like to add?


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