Aug 10, 2011 Beth Monaghan
In its first month, Google+ reached 20 million users. I am impressed. Brian Solis notes that to reach 10 million users, it took Twitter 780 days and Facebook 852 days. It took Google+ 16 days.
I like Google+ for the same reasons everyone else does: I can segment my contacts for better content sharing and it’s intuitive. Like everyone else in the social media world, I am also entrenched in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and have to constantly remind myself to update Google+.
Deciding when to cross-post and when not to is as personal a decision as what to wear to an interview. It differs for everyone and every company based on your goals and personality. I automatically feed my Tweets through LinkedIn because I use Twitter primarily for business-related conversations. I love the Selective Tweets app for Facebook because when I do pepper in personal tweets, I can feed them to Facebook without logging in separately. I also love twitpic for its easy photo updates for Twitter. I tried Twitterfeed for the InkHouse blog, but found it to be too automated, so I opted for manual tweets and updates that I can schedule over high engagement periods on the social networks of my choice.
In an effort to streamline my personal and professional updates, I started looking for a way to send Tweets to Google+. There are a number of solutions, but I was disappointed to discover that most, while creative, are really workarounds. Google+ does not allow third-party access to its API, which makes a real solution a challenge (if you are interested in the details of the Google and social media standards discussion, check out this thorough piece by Sean Ludwig on VentureBeat).
While we wait for a management solution, which is desperately needed if I’m going to fully embrace Google+ for myself and our clients, here are the workarounds I’ve found:
- TechTipsGeek’s Tanmay Ahmed suggests an interesting approach using your secret email address available through the Facebook mobile page to use your Google plus post as a status update for Facebook. Apparently, you can simply add a Circle and send your updates to that address and your post will be shared with both your Google+ and Facebook friends. This piece also suggests the Chrome extension to post updates on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
- PC Geek Blog suggests creating a RSS feed of your Google+ posts and using another service such as Twitterfeed to publish your feed to Twitter and Facebook.
- WonderHowTo’s Business Insider piece includes the two options above and another to cross-post to a blog using PlusFeed, which is helpful for writers who produce long pieces in Google+.
As you can see, these aren’t elegant, but they will work for die-hards and self-proclaimed techies. In the meantime, I will continue forcing myself to manually post while I wait for the technical social media folks to create a good solution that enables easy and segmented cross-pollination of content across all of the important channels.
Last month Google+ took down the pages for Sesame Street, Mashable, Ford and Search Engine Land, noting that the platform was not ready for business pages yet. I am still waiting for updates on that front and hoping that the introduction of Google+ business pages, hopefully some day soon, will force the issue.
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