Google plus is a great platform for a variety of reasons, with the primary one being that you will have a foot in the door as far as Google Search is concerned. Google has many indexing issues with other social media platforms, and the walled garden effect is often very serious, with all non public posts being excluded from Google's sphere of influence.Getting traction within any specific market is an ongoing issue that needs due diligence and proper interpretation of your target market audience, and when using the social media you need to ensure that those who follow you, or are within your social network form part of your target market audience. This means that you need to do true, in-depth target market research, and have a very clear understanding of who your target audience is and how you are going to interact with them in a manner that allows you to place your call to action statements. Google plus has specific options for you to do this via specialist business pages that are directly linked to your personal profile and associated page.
You do need to separate your personal life from your business life when doing any social media marketing. Failure to do this will lead to poor branding and mixed signals to your target audience. You personal profile should be used as a platform to brand yourself as an ambassador for your business and community related pages within all social media platforms, and you should never be salesy or pushy within your personal profile page. This sounds very easy, but is infact a really difficult thing to do.
You personal profile page describes you as an individual, and is where your personality and industry specific knowledge will shine through and allow others to interact and engage with you on a personal level. once you have a personal connection then you may, if appropriate, lead this person down the conversion path to become a client, customer or fellow activist in your cause.
You should have a business page in place, where you do business related stuff and push you business opportunities through links to your web site, your blog and other online resources. You should also have a community page in place where your business issues are discussed in depth and you mange various sectors of your business opportunities, through different categories within the community, informing those who have taken the time to join your community of your services, products, events and other areas of interest.
As an individual you should also be a member of various communities that have links to your business model, your products, your services or the events that you handle. This is industry specific, and you will need to choose these after studying your intended target audience and their social media habits, so that you can lead them to your business page or your community without being pushy or obnoxious in any way.
Your entire marketing team needs to be up to speed with he various platforms and different sections of each platform that you, as an individual are using, so that your personal and business profiles can be used to the best advantage to interact with your
target audience in the most appropriate manner.
A post by +curator Circle discussing some of these related issues within Google plus itself.
