Communities: Positively Impacting Google+ Pages

The Communities feature on Google+ is still fairly new, yet it has already made a considerable impact on pages. If you haven't set up a community for your page, you're missing out.

The Benefits

Creating a Community on +Google+ could be vital to your success like it was with ours, especially if you're managing a business or brand page. Here's why:

A Link

When you create a community with your Google+ page, a link will be created between the two. Community members will see a link to your page under "created by" which can be found at the top of the column, to the right of the stream. A section will also appear on your page itself with a link to the community.

A link to your page from your community

Users can also add the page to a circle, and hovering over the name of the page will show up a hover card which shows your pages picture, cover photo and tagline.

A Hovercard

Our Success Story

As soon as Communities was announced, my instinct after reporting the news on +Google Plus Daily (or #googleplusupdate as we were named back then) was to actually set up our own community for the page.

Maybe it is the fact that we got in early and it was all down to luck, I don't know. What I do know is that we got our community set up and organised quickly, creating only a few categories to avoid letting discussions get diluted, and other things such as making sure we had enough content to kick-start and engage with the community.

Keeping it Relevant

We're mostly known for reporting updates first, so we named our community "Google+ Updates". It is relevant to our page and isn't too generic nor is it specific, as we wanted to reach out to the largest audience possible without it being filled with not-so-relevant content.

Keeping on top of spam and off-topic content might have also been a factor into the success of Google+ Updates, as a lot of other popular communities at the time had lots of spam visible, but now this isn't as much of an issue any more due to improvements to the anti-spam algorithms for Communities.

Using CircleCount

Google Plus Daily had a sharp increase in followers since the launch of Communities

+CircleCount is an excellent way to keep track of follower counts for your page and community, and provides useful information such as how your content is performing and what ranking you are in different categories.

Wrap-Up

Even if you don't follow some of the things I've talked about on this post, you should see more engagement from your followers and more activity with your page by setting up a community. But it's up to you to get the ball rolling. Just like the entire Google+ experience, the more you put in, the more you'll get out of it.