Lately, I’ve been bored with Google +.  I know it’s important to stay up to date with the platform and post original content, but honestly, it started to feel like a content graveyard where I dumped the daily post and didn’t give it another thought. Well, after posting one day I decided to take a look around. Since I have to share the daily Roundpeg blog post I thought I would see if there was anything else I could be doing while there.

I dabbled in communities first and found surprising results. Even by just posting in relevant communities, the reach and visibility of my posts skyrocketed. Now, I will preface this by saying I still have research and monitoring to do to see how this converts to website views, but I will say it’s nice to see that big of an increase with little effort. You can see the impact when I changed from posting the blog daily to my small community to when I started tinkering with other relevant communities.

Communities are serious business and they don’t want you dumping your blog there.

I’ve learned a thing or two in my experience aimlessly navigating through G+. I was so offended when one of my posts got taken out of a community page. It was good content, well thought out and relevant to the community, how dare they remove it! Thanks to a good moderator, I got a message explaining why the post had been removed and what I can do to be a contributing part of the group.

Basically, good communities don’t want people posting their blog content and then expecting the rest of the community to write comments and keep the group, you know, interesting. In order for your content to stay on the page, you have to earn it. Comment on things in a way that adds to the conversation and make sure anything you post is well thought out and relevant for the whole group.

Like anything else, there is a lot of garbage. Be aware of what communities you are joining. The good ones are going to require a little bit of work, which is how it should be. Read through some posts before you join a community. I fell into this when I started putting some time into G+ and it was easy to tell I had joined a junk group. Every day new people would follow me and their content was nothing that I would consider helpful. Yeah, it’s cool to have more people following you, but more than likely these people aren’t worth your time. There are good communities out there, you just have to find them. My advice to you, do some research and find the good ones or start by building a community with people you know and trust will provide good content.

Collections are pretty cool. I’m still getting to know this one and have yet to make any real progress but if nothing else it lets your audience know you have more than just one post about a topic. Multiple ideas and pieces increase your credibility and let people know you are a trusted resources when it comes to that topic. It’s also a good way to get into good communities and prove yourself as an expert, worthy of being in interesting group discussions.

G+ isn’t a place I want to spend a lot of my time, but it is worth putting in some effort. I have also found interesting content there to share. With a group of people taking the time to care about a social platform, odds are they are willing to share your content too if they find it helpful. I still have some monitoring to do to see how well G+ efforts are paying off, but spending a few extra minutes a day there isn’t much more effort than what I already do. Take some time and reintroduce yourself to G+.