This week Google+ released a new metric called View Counts which now appear on the cover images or pages and profiles. This is a metric that shows others just how many times your content has been viewed by other people but what exactly does this mean?
Mark Traphagen has an excellent write up that you can find here, but from my understanding view counts are a measure of your posts that are viewed with in a stream or engaged with, shares of a post that are seen by others this counts for both the original content producers and sharer, embedded Google+ posts, photos and images seen in stream or on blogger, picasa or chromecast and when someone opens your profile or page in a new tab or window all of this is calculated.
So basically almost every interaction that is taken with our content, including views are calculated by Google and increases your Google+ View Count.
Why Has Google Done This?
As Mark speculates and I agree with him, Â is that Google has seen an increase in users gaming the system to quickly build up their follower count with no regard to actual engagement. This is important as an influx of users only interested in gaming the system endangers the entire system by dragging in low quality content which leads to less time spent on the site and keeps users from coming back to the site because of the perception that only low quality content can be found.
Along with this I also think that Google is trying to shake off the often reported label of Ghost Town by showing numbers that people and brands can stand behind and say look I have 3 million views it’s obvious that there is an audience here maybe I should be spending more time developing my community here.
Should You Be Paying Attention To This?
I think that this is a first step for Google in beginning to open up the platform and to begin seriously competing with Facebook. One thing that Facebook has going for it is the ability for me as a manager to look at my posted content and gauge the what and when of how my content is performing with my audience. This information is invaluable as it allows you to then tweak your content based on audience preference enabling you to deliver content that your audience is most interested in.
This is something missing completely from Google+ that is unless you take a third party tool route which can be limiting. Google could easily tie its Analytics product into Google+ and begin showing users on a post by post basis how the content is performing and other valuable metrics that can be used by marketers to deliver even higher quality content to a more engaged audience.
It’s been a big news week for Google+ as a Forrester report has came out showing that Google+ is as popular in the US as Twitter and that on average, brands using the Google owned social network have on average 90 percent of the Google+ fans as they do Twitter Fans.
One big thing to mention as well is that this report found that fans are more likely to engage with updates from brands on Google+ than they are on Twitter.
It looks to me like the secret surrounding Google+ is out and that if your brand is looking to make an impact Google+ may just be the place you want to be going forward.
Switching gears now away from Google+ is a topic that I want to talk about and that would be is social media automation an evil thing? I touched on scheduling tools in Episode 6 of the Social 360 podcast which you can find here.
Now before I get into this I want to tell you a little bit about myself.
I am happily married to my best friend and we will in fact be celebrating our tenth anniversary this month and along with my beautiful wife my family consists of three children all under the age of 10. My son who is 8, my middle daughter at 6 and my youngest daughter at 3 and so my house is busy, loud and constantly changing.
My family means the world to me and I made a conscious decision before having children that my they would always take priority over anything else going on in my life. That means that evenings and weekends are intended  to be work free and instead involves spending time time with the family doing the things that we love to do.
We are an active family enjoying trips to the park, camping, hiking, biking along with many other activities both indoor and out.
So, what if anything does this have to do with social media?
I think that for anyone working in social media or digital marketing we can be consumed by the hours it takes in creating new content, learning new techniques to apply to our marketing, running the day to day operations of our business, marketing out content and services, sharing content with our audience and interacting with our fans, friends and followers on the different social networks we participate in. If we’re not careful on how we manage our time, it’s very easy for this work to spill over into our personal lives which can affect the quality of our home and family lives.
I’m going to share with you my dirty little secret and that is I use automation and scheduling tools for evenings and weekends in order to take back my time and spend more of it with my family.
When use appropriately and not abused social media automation can be a fantastic tool that can help a busy individual like you and me make the most out of the hours we have during the day. But it can be an often abused tool that makes people completely disregard the most important thing about social media and that is in being social.
If you completely disregard actual engagement in your social channels you are effectively turning social media into nothing more than an addition broadcast channel for you and that is not what social is about. Instead you should turn to using tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, DoShare, Friends+Me, Post Planner, Feedly, CoSchedule and even your mobile phone as a way to augment the work you are already doing in regards to relationship building and providing value to your established networks.
Social media doesn’t have to be a 24 hour job and with the proper tools and system in place you can still deliver high quality, informative, educational and entertaining content to your networks without looking and acting like a robot. The trick to this all is being smart about what tasks you automate and when you automate them.
One piece of technology that can connect all this and simplify it for you is your mobile device. This handy thing is with us pretty much at all times now and if you take advantage of the apps and tools you can install on your phone you can do a quick reply to someone while on your way out to dinner or in the car and all without having to be tethered to your computer.  Now this can also be a downfall and has to be managed appropriately as well because it is far too easy to get sucked back into working if we are constantly connected and if the goal is to get away from work, constantly checking in on your device isn’t freeing you up from anything.
So is automation and scheduling in social media a bad thing? It depends. When used purely to broadcast your message it definitely is but if you use it responsibly as a tool for creating more time for yourself it can definitely be a great addition to your toolbox as long as you remember to still engage and participate on a regular basis then I see no harm in using automation and scheduling tools.
The social part of social media is not being killed off by tools that automate and provide scheduling options, it’s the people who use these tools to broadcast only there messages that are in fact killing the social part of social media.
Canva is my selection for tool of the week and it is a free to use graphic design program that can make even the most graphically design challenged individuals like myself look like artists who know what they are doing.
It has a intuitive drag and drop interface, easy to use colour selection tools, great looking backgrounds, fonts and text placeholders and thousands of elements you can use for free to create stunning graphics and images for your blog posts and social network messages. If you’re wondering how all this awesomeness could possibly be free, they monetize by charging a dollar for certain images, graphics and backgrounds. You can add as many of the free elements, paid elements or a combination of the two to your design and afterwards you pay for only what you have used. I have been playing with this tool for about a week now and have yet to use a paid element because the amount and quality of free to use elements is enough for me to choose from in creating what I need.
The Canva blog is also an excellent resource for learning how to get more out of Canva and for design tips and tricks in general.
With how visual social is becoming not having a graphic element to go along with any content you produce can hurt your chances of that content being seen in the most places possible and while I still love PicMonkey, Canva is now another place that I can turn to in helping me create high quality images to help my content get noticed more and gain more traction.
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The post Episode #008 – Is Social Media Automation And Scheduling Evil? appeared first on Social 360.
