Top Five Google+ Tools
Since we’ve released the Google+ Beginner’s Guide and since updated it with the latest features, we thought we’d share what we think are the top five Google+ tools that you should use to get the most out of the network.
Use these tools to discover new Google+ members to follow, to manage your circles and much more. Business users would also benefit from utilizing these tools to help their brand awareness, engagement and to find conversations they should be a part of.
CircleCount – Diamond Award Winner!
Head over to Popular > Engagement and select Profiles, Pages, or Communities and find people, pages or communities worth following. If you really want to dive in, check out the Specials menu. It will show you all sorts of hot posts, profiles and so much more.
Of course, as shown on the right, the “You!” section has all sorts of tools and resources you can use. Click “Your Profile” to see statistics on your Google+ content, see what people love the most, see how many people are circling you each day, see what posts are getting the most comments, +1s and reshares.
Visit CircleCount, sign in with your profile and away you go!
Circloscope – Circles Management
For anyone that has used Google+ for longer than a month, you know that managing your circles can be a laborious task. Enter Circloscope to the rescue! Above, we created a quick animated gif from within the browser plugin that shows you all of the features available. When you click any of the items from the dashboard menu, you’ll be presented with additional options and customizations.
With Circloscope, the 5,000 circles limit that Google+ imposes will no longer be a problem. Filter out the inactive people, place highly relevant people in special circle groups, filter and sort with many options to choose from, export your circles and you can even undo accidental uncircles. Here’s a quick tutorial by Christine DeGraff that explains and shows Circloscope uses.
$47/year covers your main profile and 3 pages.
$178/year covers your main profile and 15 business pages.
Compatible with Google Chrome only.
Friends+Me – Automated Social Sharing
If you happen to enjoy Google+ so much that you use them as your primary social media network, then you’ll really love Friends+Me. This tool will allow you to share your Google+ profile and page content to your other popular social media accounts, automatically. In addition to this primary feature, you can also take advantage of their scheduling features to share your content on other social networks at optimal times.
Currently, Friends+Me supports: Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, App.Net and Tumblr.
Without a doubt, Friends+Me is the best sharing tool that you can use if you use Google+ as your primary social network. There’s nothing more powerful than sharing posts and content on your Google+ profile or page and knowing that this service will share it across other major platforms for you.
Friends+Me also provides a Google Chrome extension. With this on your browser, you can take advantage of added enhancements to make sharing to your other social media as easy as possible. The extension is not required to use this service (for those that enjoy a clutter-free browsing experience).
$9/mo for 10 accounts.
$29/mo for 20 accounts.
$59/mo for 60 accounts.
All My + Statistics
Here’s another fun tool to play around with if you’ve ever used Google+ before. As the name suggests, this tool will show you stats all about your profile and it includes the ability to see an overview (see Scott Buehler’s stats to the left), locations, charts, popular posts, people, photos and more.
One of our favorite features of this particular tool is the “People” section because it shows you all of your biggest fans that have reshared your content. It helped identify people that we weren’t aware of who constantly shared our content.
Visit their website and connect your Google+ profile.
Buffer – Queue Content for Google+
Another fantastic tool for business users, fun G+ topical pages and many niches in-between, is Buffer, which allows you to schedule posts not only to your Gooogle+ pages but to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and App.net.
Once you set up your Buffer with times to share content and connect all of your social media, you can then browse the Internet as your normally would but now, when you see something amazing that would be a perfect fir for your page(s), you can now click the buffer button and schedule / queue that content along with your description.
Of course, to enable these quick-sharing features with Buffer, you will need a browser add on. Unlike the other tools we mentioned here, Buffer offers apps with all of the major browsers. Just visit this page and Buffer will detect your browser and offer you a blue button to install the browser add-on. From there, you’ll be off to the races and sharing content in no time.
You can also use Google+ posting enhancements to bold and italics you content, see our Google+ Beginner’s Guide (under Google Plus Formatting Options) for how to do that.
$10/mo for the “Awesome Plan” that will allow you to connect RSS feeds, queue up to 200 posts and tweets, connect 12 social profiles and more.
We’re curious to hear what your favorite Google+ tools are. Leave a comment below and let us know!
