Tag Archives: Googleplus

What is the growth rate of your social media profile?

April 3, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Social media is here to stay and is expanding its reach daily. In a few years, marketers may devote double the resources to professional social media accounts. But, what does the future look like for you?

We all spend time working on our social media accounts. Some of us have more followers than others. But, my question is, how fast do your accounts grow?

Google+
My Google Plus account only grows when I follow others. I publish popular industry specific content mixed with beautiful pictures and content of more general interest. We get at least fifty interactions per day, but no growth from the content no matter how popular it is. It seems that there are only two ways to grow a Google+ account. You have to have a fan base already that finds you because you have a G+ icon on your main site. Or, you follow lots of people and they follow you back. Even Guy Kawasaki who has over six million followers on G+ has a growth rate of less than 1% per month and he gets his content shared hundreds of times per day!

Twitter
A Twitter follower is only about 10% as potent for getting clicks as a G+ follower. However, Twitter is an easy medium for growth. Personally, I follow about 2000 new people per week on my main Twitter account and get a few hundred to follow me back. I can get 300 new followers per week without even trying. Additionally, if I publish twenty hot articles about my industry that I found on the web and get shared, I can get a lot more followers on top of that. I don’t have an exact number for that though. My estimate is that I might get 100 new Twitter followers if I get about 45 shares or favorites. Additionally, if I have ongoing discussions with other Twitterers, then Twitter introduces me to more people in their, “you might also like” section. If I used Twitter to the maximum, I could probably get around 800 new followers per week. On other mediums, this would be nearly impossible

Facebook
Facebook makes it easy to grow your presence with PPC for attracting new followers as well as PPC for sharing your articles. Both types of PPC have worked miracles for me. My facebook is currently growing at about 8% per month posting twice a day and using PPC. In three years, I might go from 9000 followers to 60,000.

Predicting Growth Rates
It is hard to predict growth rates on social media. The speed you are growing at now is not the same as the speed you will be growing at in a few years. You might reach a saturation point in attracting your relevant audience at a particular point, and then experience a slow down in growth. Or, your medium could stop growing which will affect your growth. Additionally, social media mediums could change their algorithm for how helpful they are in promoting your profile, or change their advertising rates or offerings.

How I see my future using G+
However, in my long run, I see getting a lot of clicks from Google+ since I am gaining a lot of followers through a very labor intensive practice of following and unfollowing. However, I don’t see much growth happening after I stop doing my manual promotion. Exponential growth doesn’t seem likely. I hope I’m wrong and that I am given the opportunity to grow into the millions.

Twitter – my future
Twitter makes it hard to get any serious amount of clicks unless you have 50,000+ followers. But, the good news is that in a few years, I see myself having that many followers. Additionally, I follow other large accounts that have grown a lot. One of the social media accounts I follow grew from around 60,000 to 100,000 in the last two years. Additionally, an account of general interest that I follow went from 400,000 to 550,000 in the last several years. These two accounts post regularly and have experienced growth rates of about 25-30% per year which is excellent and gives me hope. At the rate they are going they will be in the millions in a few years.

Facebook in the future
Right now I have 9000 Facebook followers on my Notary Facebook. I have different accounts for the different sites I manage, but the Notary Facebook is the most dynamic since we have such good followers. We’re growing at 8% per month. Since most of our followers are Realtors, and Mortgage Bankers, we might run out of potential followers after we hit 50,000, but it is looking like we’ll get to 50,000 in three years. We’re already getting 3000 or more clicks per month from Facebook, so it will be a waterfall of clicks in three years!

What about your future?
It is hard to predict which social media medium will do best in your future. So compare a few, and then really focus on the one that gives you some serious results. You need to track your analytics yourself because your individual situation si unique and not like mine or anyone elses.

Follow limits on Googleplus & how to handle it like a pro

December 21, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged | Leave a comment

I remember bumping my head against the ceiling on Google+ for a month. I am a relatively new user on Google+ and certain things just bugged me. I want to create a large following as fast as possible to get the SEO benefits, but there are limitations. Google doesn’t want you following too many people too quickly, especially if you are new.

The rule of 3.5
Googleplus will not let you follow more than 3.5 times as many users as who follow you. So, if 300 people follow you, you can follow around 1050 total.

The 24 hour rule
Googleplus will set limits on how many people you can follow in a 24 hour period. If you were following at 2pm yesterday, you will have trouble following if you login at 1pm today. You will have to wait to do your following.

The interacting rule
Googleplus likes it when you interact with others, especially if they comment, or plus your comment. Sometimes Google will limit how many people you can follow in a day, but lift that limit if you make some intelligent comments to other people’s posts.

The follow-back rule
Google will let you follow more people if you follow-back people following you. If you schedule your daily 20 minutes on G+, I suggest the following itinerary: Unfollow a few dozen people from a circle that has been around for about a week. You need to mark your circles in a way so you know when you added them. Next, follow the people on your posts page in the upper right corner who are following you. Most of them will be people you are not following. Google puts them up there because Google wants you to follow them in particular. Next, do some following from a targetted source and label the circle you put them in thoughtfully. Finally, do some posting or share someone else’s post. Wait a few hours before your next post. Following back should come 2nd, in your daily G+ itinerary — and for a reason. If you follow them first when you are your limit of # of followers, you might be bumping your head on the ceiling.

Using sister accounts
Many experts like the idea of having multiple Google+ accounts that work as a team. One technique that has worked a charm is to invite people from your googleplus account #2 to join the community on googleplus account #1. If they join your community, they are likely to join your main account as well. This is a way to get more followers significantly faster for those of you who want to reach 1000 followers as fast as humanly possible.

That’s all for now. Happy following, and remember — when using Google+, you need to have a system. Keep all your circles thoughtfully labeled and time stamped (somehow) according to when they were created and when they are to be removed — if they are to be removed!

Ratios & Metrics in my personal social media adventure

September 20, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

It always interests me to understand how much I invest in building a particular medium, and how much I can get out of it. I have been working on a few Twitter profiles for years. My largest has about 9000 followers, and we get about 1.5 clicks per tweet assuming those tweets are not during the middle of the night. Sure, there are optimal times in the day for tweeting, but I can only do it when I can.

Twitter click/tweet ratio
What I learned is that it takes me about 15 minutes, three times a week to manage a Twitter profile and grow it by about 300 members per week. Sometimes I am busy and can only do it once, but if I do what I am supposed to, I get a new follower rate of about 400 per hour spent, and then put time into following people back, doing a little tweeting, and interacting. 400/hour is not a bad ratio. I can’t do much more than 15 minutes per session or my relevancy rate of targeting new followers becomes not worth it. Since my largest account gets 1.5 clicks per tweet, and has 9000 followers, you could say that it might take me 22 hours of labor spent slowly for several months to get 1.5 clicks per tweet. If I spent 100 hours of time, my tweet rate might go up to 7 or more depending on the relevancy rate. Another factor to consider is that my older followers might not be so active. New followers on Twitter tend to click and retweet a lot more than old ones.

With my other Twitter account I get .75 clicks per tweet with 2000 followers, so the ratio is very different because the followers were more recently acquired. Interesting data!

Google+ click/post ratio
On a brighter note, my Google+ account is getting me more like 4 clicks per post average with only 600 followers. This is a rough estimate. I’ll fine tune it once I get to about 1000 followers. It is hard to take a measurement because I don’t know how popular a particular post will be until afterwards. In any case, It is exciting to get all of these clicks.

Google plus makes it slower and harder to acquire followers. I have become good at it, but the actual physical process of implanting them in one of your circles is cumbersome as the load time is currently slow with Googleplus. On the other hand, unfollowing is easy if you remove the whole circle that particular followees are in. Five seconds, and I can delete hundreds of followees with whom that I have given a week to follow me back.

Comparison
It seems that with Twitter, I get about 1 click per 3000 newer followers per tweet, and a somewhat lesser ratio with older followers of perhaps 1 click per 6000. It might take 8 hour of labor to get 3000 followers to get that 1click/tweet ratio. With Googleplus, it takes more like one hour of labor to get perhaps only 60 followers. I can follow about 500, but only 12-15% actually follow me back. However, those 60 followers are much more valuable to me than 60 twitter followers. So, it might take 2.5 hours of labor to get 150 followers on Googleplus. Those 150 followers would get me the same click rate that 3000 recent (12 months or less) followers on Twitter would get me. However, for the sake of numbers, let me do a 100 hour guesstimate for both mediums.

100 hours of twitter: 40,000 followers: 12 clicks / tweet
100 hours on G+: 6000 followers: 40 clicks / post

This is purely an estimate though. Additionally, I will say that on on of my Google+ accounts, the length of visits is much higher than on other mediums. I got average visits of four minutes this month which is fantastic. My other Google+ account (for notary work) got slightly above average for minutes per visit which is also encouraging.

Based on inconclusive evidence, it seems that Google+ might be a much more efficient medium for getting clicks than Twitter, although Facebook is still the king of social media as far as vast volumes of clicks is concerned. Also, don’t overlook Twitter for SEO value as it can be the most effective tool if you get in depth interactions with others or high quantities of retweets!

Google+ suspended me, but I learned something

September 5, 2010 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Google+ has many members because gmail automatically gives you an account attached to your gmail account. So, the number of users on Google+ is deceivingly high if you look at this top-line analytic. The total amount of active members has also been manipulated. The total number of members who login several times a month might be low, and the total number of members with accounts with 1000+ followers would be a much better analytic for comparisons.

Google+ makes it hard to grow
It is hard to grow a business presence on Google+ by using Google+. If you put a G+ button on your already popular website, that is the easiest way to get followers if you already get big traffic. There are many people using Google+ in social media, travel, and programming. But, other industries have a very sparse presence. Basically, there are very few good accounts to follow. Additionally, Google+ limits the number of accounts you can follow in a day. On Twitter to gain followers, you follow lots of others and then they follow you back. On Google+, only 10% of the relevant people I follow, actually follow me back. It makes it very hard to grow.

Moderators can get you lynched
Posting on Google+ communities is a fast way to get clicks. I posted lots of relevant content in the programming, social media, and outsourcing communities. The content I posted was 100% relevant to each community and hand-picked. I published about 20 pieces per day, and was rejected by seven moderators in a period of a week. This was the biggest reason why I feel I was shut down. So, you can’t follow a lot of people without being stopped, you can’t post content without getting in trouble, what can you do?

The Google Gods can shut you down permanently
If you decide to use Google+, it has some nice features like circles. It is fun, and might make a difference for your SEO rank. But, if you invest heavily in your profile, beware! If you do something that the Google Gods don’t like, they can shut you down permanently. They will probably warn you and suspend you a few times first. But, they are the ones in control, not you. Your investment of hours of your time can be completely wiped out on a whim of the Gods! So, use caution.

I wasn’t informed of what I did wrong
I spent two hours on hold calling Google to try to figure out what I did wrong. Nobody answered and no information was furnished. I used the G+ help feature and got an answer from an answer-giver who didn’t sound like he worked for Google although he was knowledgeable. He said that he was once suspended too, and that they refuse to tell you what you did wrong because they don’t want you gaming the system. I was given a list of policies of what behavior they don’t allow — however, I didn’t feel that I broke any of their guidelines. My only crime was following too many people, and not being popular with a bunch of anal moderators.

How, can I plan my future with G+
I am still allowed to use the “+” feature and have gotten a few new followers using it. Maybe plussing is the way to get ahead on Google+, and not following or posting? It is all a big mystery to me. If you have a large following, then posting on your account will get you lots of exposure, but I only have 150 followers. What to do? I plan to share a lot less on communities. The communities I do share on will be ones that have never rejected a post in the past. I will look carefully and un-join any communities that have moderators that block my posts — ever! I will also post more on my own account since that is safe. I will probably do more plussing since that is also safe. I’m not sure how I will reach the magical 1000 mark where your SEO dreams supposedly come true. Maybe my new techniques will work. What I really want is to find an expert. I have been looking around, but with no luck.

A month after the fact: I have been reinstated on Google. I’m being a lot more careful now. I seldom post on groups as that was what got me in the most trouble (I think.) But, I posted a very helpful article from the best social media account on G+ on one a very relevant community page and the moderator removed it. I’m beginning to think that perhaps G+ makes it hard to grow until you get critical mass of around 1000 followers, and then they help your material get noticed a lot more. I guess I’ll find out. I’m at 200 members now.