Blog

Are you using Google+ yet, for either business or leisure? Google’s social media site has now introduced 18 new features to make them stand out against other social media networks. These new features are based around photos, mobile, hangouts and much more.

While some may have written off Google+ as a ghost town, this is an unfair assessment. The social networking site now boasts over 400 million members, 100 million of which are active monthly members. If your business isn’t on Google+ you could be missing out on a valuable way of connecting with your market.

Thankfully these new features that Google+ have introduced provide some great enhancements to Google+’s core functionality and will encourage users to engage much more with the website than they would have previously. The additional features have been added in to enhance the mobile experience of using Google+, a wise move given that the future of the internet is becoming increasingly mobile driven.

What are the new Google+ features?

One of the biggest additions has to be the ‘Link’ button which makes sharing links to blog posts really easy. Meanwhile their Photo button makes capturing your images on the go more convenient. Another addition is the ‘Check-in’ button which allows you to update where your current location is. Location based social media sharing is a big part of social sharing, so it’s a clever move by Google+ who are looking for new ways to connect people.

If you use the Google+ app on your iPhone you’ll notice that on iOS which is the new version, you can swipe through photos albums in a line, so all you have to do is tap the screen once to view them. It also lets the user pan across the screen or zoom in slowly to view pictures. The comments section underneath photos will also look different because it now shows other users your content from small snippets of text to long comments.

The ‘Communities’ feature is a recent addition too and it’s designed as a replacement for the old school groups, forums and message boards. The Communities feature allows users to set up their own place. It’s different to facebook’s profile pages for businesses and is much more like Yahoo! Groups, allowing members to set up their own profile place to discuss their hobbies or interests whether that’s football, technology or world events, etc.

Google+ Communities  gives users the option of creating a community for example about music and then creating a number of sub-categories within this such as ‘Jazz’, ‘Pop’, ‘Country’ and ‘Heavy Metal’ to name just a few. You also have the option of subscribing to any updates from your favourite circles. You can receive mobile notifications from these and the purpose is to encourage more interaction with Google+ Communities on your mobile and tablet devices.

These are just some of the interesting features which Google+ have integrated into their site to make sharing social media even easier and more exciting.

By Chelsey Evans

Follow @AmpheonLtd