Social media marketing is an essential ingredient to gaining visibility for the content you create on-line. In this post, I will show you how to maximise the impact of your Google+ posts, to increase your visibility.
Formatting a Google+ post
Being able to make text bold, italic, or even with a strike through, is something social networks have seemingly ignored in the past. You will be familiar with it, from using word processing software in it’s many guises (Word, LibreOffice, Google Docs, etc.).
Google+ is different is many ways and one of them is in its ability to format posts.
The method is very simple, just surround the text you want to format with some special characters, like this.
- Asterisks for bold. *your text goes here*
- Underscores for italics. _your text goes here_
- Hyphens for strike throughs. -your text goes here-
You won’t see your text in bold, italic or with a strike through, until you share it. Google+ handles the display from there.
You can see from the embedded post above, if you use Chrome there are some nice little extensions to make life easier. I have Post editor for Google+ installed in my Chrome browser.
Give your post headings
While you can use bold text to highlight specific words, you might also want to consider using bold text to give your post a heading and sub headings.
Headings do two things.
-
They help lay out the post and divide it into sections, which makes it easier for people to read.
-
They help lay out the post and divide it into sections, which makes it easier for Google Search to read.
What was that? Yes, Google Search. Every single public post that you make on Google+ is a web page that gets indexed by Google Search. As such, the same guidelines about using bold text apply.
Include your target keywords
While you can’t force your Google+ post to use h1 and h2 tags, you can still include your chosen keywords and phrases as bold text. Search engines notice when you do this and determine that the text you have highlighted may be important.
Good use of headings in your Google+ posts and including the keywords and phrases that matter, will help them rank in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Take a look at this simple post below by Plus Your Business.
The main heading tells the reader exactly what the post is about, but importantly it also tells the search engines too.
Reading through the post you’ll notice a sub heading. Again, it tells the reader exactly what is going to come next, which happens to be a clearly laid out list.
Google+ creates long lasting content
Google+ posts stick around for a long time. A really long time. Shouldn’t we all be taking care of them as best we can?
Think of it like this, if it was a web page on your own site, would you leave it unformatted, or would you try to make it look as good as possible?
By Alan Stainer