Social media Monday—Google Plus for Writers Part Four—Yes You can Schedule Google+ Updates!

by +EdieMelson @EdieMelson

Today I’m going to finish out my series on Google Plus by telling you how to set up your Google Plus account so you can use a program like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule your posts. But before we get started, if you missed the first three posts in this series, here are the direct links:

Google Plus for Writers Part One—Establish GoogleAuthorship

Google Plus for Writers Part Two—So What's Up with Circles

Google Plus for Writers Part Three—Set Up Your Profile

I’ve been watching Google Plus almost since it began. I was invited to be a beta user and was immediately intrigued and pleased with the potential I saw in this social media platform. As Google+ became accessible to everyone, the one big drawback was the fact that you couldn’t schedule updates in an ancillary program like Hootsuite or Buffer.

As many of you know, utilizing a scheduling program is the foundation of how I manage my social media life. So there was no way I was going to change my way of doing things for one network.

Then Google+ enabled pages and almost immediately released permission for these to be added to the networks available on Hootsuite and others.

Now don’t panic. I felt the same way you do when I first heard about something else that segregates users into personal profiles and professional pages. Because of my prejudice (thank you Facebook) I was slow to explore all the options this opened up.

But eventually my curiosity won out and I began to explore this new aspect of Google Plus. What I found encouraged me to experiment. Here’s what I found:

1. It’s easy to open a Google+ page in addition to your personal profile.
2. When you connect your Google+ profile and page, scheduling updates to your Google+ page will not just grow your Google+ page, but also your Google+ profile.

Here’s how to do this:

1. Go to your Google + Profile and click on PAGES in the vertical menu on the left side of your screen (see screenshot below).

Screenshot 1

2. Click on GET YOUR PAGE. If you don’t already have a page, this is all you’ll see on this page. You can see in the screenshot below that I already have two Google+ pages.

Screenshot 2

3. Choose your business type. I recommend choosing BRAND (see screenshot below).

Screenshot 3

4. Now you’ll need to fill out the form. It’s fairly self-explanatory until you get to TYPE OF PAGE. You only have 4 choices:

• Product or Brand
• Entertainment
• Community
• Other

I chose Community, but from what I can tell, it really doesn’t matter which one you pick. Below is a screenshot showing you how I filled out the form.

Screenshot 4

5. Now add your photo and a cover to your page account. You do this the same way you did for your Google+ profile.

6. There are two final things you need to do to connect your page and your profile.

• Go to your personal profile and add your page to your circles.
• Go to your page and add your personal profile to your circles.

Using these instructions, you can now schedule you Google+ updates to your page and grow all aspects of your Google+ account.

Here are a few random things you need to know:

• I don’t do anything with my Google+ page. I still do most of my interaction on my profile. The only thing I do is use my page to schedule updates.
• You’ll get notifications that people have added your page to their circles. You can add them back or not as you please. I go in about twice a week and check my notifications (this is where you’ll find who has added you to circles) and add back people.

This is my last planned post in this series. But if I get additional questions in the comments section, I add an encore. So be sure to let me know if there’s something else you’d like to know about Google Plus for Writers.

Don’t forget to join the conversation!

Blessings,

Edie

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