Why Google+ matters for ecom more than any other social medias

It’s obvious participating in Google+ helps your visibility in personal results. But it’s also likely that Google is or will factor social shares as a trust signal, and thus a ranking factor. Spammy sites don’t tend to get organic shares, so it’s one way to spot chaff among wheat. Because Google has full visibility into Google+, it’s easy to spot the fake “sock puppet” accounts — it’s tougher to game the system.

Social link building is becoming as important as old school link building. If you think you don’t need to invest in Google+ until it hits critical mass, or until you can demonstrate a “measurable ROI” from your efforts, competitors who do grok the Plus could leave you in their dust in traditional search rankings, not just personal results.

What You Should Do About Google+

1. Put the Google+ chicklet on all your site pages
2. Treat the chicklet like a call to action (don’t bury it, consider testing placement for best engagement, measure clicks on the button as a micro-conversion metric, etc.)
3. Appoint someone in your organization or an outsourced specialist to own your Google+ marketing effort (this can be part of a larger social media role)
4. Share images and video content regularly, tag appropriately with keywords (multimedia content stands out in search and may be weighted higher, also more likely to be shared by others)
5. Optimize your shares like you would for Twitter or the Facebook Newsfeed
6. Encourage Facebook and Twitter subscribers to also follow you on Google+
7. Segment your email subscriber list and target Gmail accounts with a special request to add you their Circles (along with the benefits of doing so)
8. Use Google+ as a microblog to give product usage tips, feature customer reviews, announce new products and sales events, etc.
9. Engage in “social listening” within Google+, find out who’s talking about you and engage with them. Activity across the network may give your social profile a bit more clout with Google when personalizing results, similar to EdgeRank’s Affinity Score.