Pixiq

Google+ has entered social media like a hurricane, adding 10.000.000 users every single week, and now, after they opened doors for everyone (no invite needed to join G+ anymore!!!) Google+ will grow even faster.

If you recently joined G+ and do not want to sink in that huge stream, here is my story to help you to become visible.

I do not want to go through the G+ acount setup process, it is covered many times, and one of the best articles is right here, written by Damien Franco: Getting Started in Google Plus: A Photographer's Guide.

Honestly, I have not read any of the G+ guides myself, so here you'll find the pure experience of a newcomer. I am going to tell you about things I've learned myself and with help of G+ community. Please use them at your own risk:-)

After you have done a basic setup of your G+ account, take a look at few things worth your attention:

First: Privacy policy and Google+ license. I never was worried about sharing my pictures, and I have no problem with Google doing this. This will only help me in promoting myself as a photographer. However, it would be wise not to allow print and download of your photos.

On your Google+ home page:

Un-check these two options:

and then...

Second. Allow everybody to mention you in posts. It works like this: if you add "+" in front of G+ user name, Google will recognize it and will add a link to person's G+ profile. Linked users will also receive a notification of such an event.

I like to know who has mentioned me as much as I want other people to be able to reach my profile in one click, so I did this:

Go to G+ settings and

Add public and extended circles on the very last option:

The rest should be pretty easy and intuitive: photos and videos upload (I suggest using youtube or vimeo links instead), sharing URLs, etc.

Do not forget to include as many links as you have to your other public profiles:

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Now, the most important is what you need to do to get people to follow you.

First, the easiest: you can start to follow other photographers (this is what I did at the beginning) and about 30% will follow you in return. You can start from my followers (do not forget to include Alex Koloskov  to your circle, especially considering this cool giveaway:-), as I've got pretty good company on G+: people who passionate about photography same as myself, those who like my work and my posts.

There is also a good list of photographers you can follow right away on a Damien's article, I do not want to repeat them here.

Now lets talk about what to do next: the main difference of being on Google +, as I see it...

G+ if very fast growing community, and as it usually happens in such a situation, many people feel united by a new network. There is more excitement all around on Google + than on any other social network right now.

I see tons of very interesting information and hundreds of amazing images posted by fellow photographers every day. It is completely different from what I use to see on Facebook, for example.
So, the main key to success on Google + is to post interesting content: post best of your images and include a little story of how you have them done. It makes them interesting to others, and people are more likely to start following you.

For me, it was relatively easy to supply interesting and quite useful content, as I have hundreds of articles on the blog (Technical secrets of studio photography) and I can share a lot of them among my followers... But it is better to post less than to post what you are going to eat followed by photo of the dish:-)
Please, do not post anything like this to a public circle:

There is Facebook for such stuff, lets keep G+ interesting and clean... it is still so young for this crap ;-))

Some of the good practices on how to get most from your G+ posts:

Do not post all the images you have at once. You can always group them later into albums, but because G+ stream runs very fast there is a big chance that your post will sink down in a minutes. Instead, post one image every hour or so. It will give it a much better chance to get noticed and be followed in return.

Add an interesting description to the image you post. I've already mentioned this.

If you think your post is interesting and might be useful for others, ask people to share it. I've noticed that similar post gets shared 3-5 times more if I've specifically ask to "share if you like this".

Submit large images. G+ creates picasa-like preview and larger (1200-1600 pixels wide) images really catch viewer attention, encouraging people to follow you.

Add a description to the image. It can be some useful information about the image itself or about your blog, etc.

Share good and interesting stuff you see on your G+ stream posted by others. There is nothing new in this advice, but quite often we forgot to share something which catches our attention and is worth sharing.

Use G+ circles wisely: If you have many different and somehow controversial interests, better to share them in different circles: photography - for photographers, your lovely paintball/racing/restaurants/whatever else you have/ things in the circles where you have people with similar interests.

For example, all my family photos and messages I share within family circle, and my mother (she lives in Europe) can see them instantaneously while it does not bother my photographer followers.

Same thing with your close friends, it might be wise to have dedicated circle to share “local” news and hangouts with only them.

It is like having your own radio station: by dividing broadcast to a different channels/podcasts you will gain much more value in each category of your listeners rather than by mixing all content in one stream.

If you have a post or article you want to bring attention to, do not post a link alone (even though G+ will fetch a preview image for you): I found that it work much better if I post a related image and add a description with the link on top of it. Images are the most attention-catching things and we can use this advantage. Example of how I usually post a blog article:

And this is how it looks after it is posted:

Do Hangouts.
People like them, and I've gained more than 50 followers in less then hour when did a hangout during one of our photo-sessions. I did not talk to much, showing our shooting process instead (it was sort of broadcast from a studio). I've got an amazing feedback after it was done and immediately followed with the images from that shoot, which added even more value to the whole event:

Be wise, care about what you post and share, be honest,  and soon you'll see every time you login to G+ something like this (or even better!):

So, this is where I am now (Click on the image to find out more):

Pretty cool, isn't it? :-))

Few tricks I’ve learned:

If you want to make text bold use asterisk (*) from both sides of the world/sentence. Underscore (_) will make text italic.

As you may expect, G+ works the best on Google chrome browser, and there is a pretty neat plugin which will help you to handle G+ stream: http://huyz.us/google-plus-me

It allows you to collapse incoming stream and  does other little tricks:-)

There is also a very good article about G+ written by Colby Brown: Google+: The Survival Guide for a Photographer’s Paradise v1.1

Wish you to become good Gpluskins!

Yours,
Alex Koloskov

P.S if you know something which I do not about Google plus, please post in a comments below.