You can use Google+ communities to find other people to connect with around a passion for your industry or niche. If no one has created the community you’re looking for, you can create your own. You must have a registered profile or page on Google+ to create a community.
Step 1: Create a Community
On Google+, navigate to communities and click on create community.
Select which kind of community you’d like to create:
- Public: You community will be open to the world. You can choose if anyone can join or people have to ask to join.
- Private: Only invited members can join the community and see what’s shared. You can choose to hide it from searches, or people can find it in searches and have to ask to join.
Give your community a name, a tag line and a photo. You can add categories to your community to guide discussions, and help members find the topics they’re most interested in. For example, if you’ve started a community for Guelph Small Business owners, you could have categories for the various concerns of a business owner such as marketing, networking and accounting. You can also add a category specifically for new members to introduce themselves. This will help you recognize when people join your community and welcome them appropriately.
The “About Your Community” section gives you an opportunity to explain the intention of the community and layout some guidelines or rules that the community members should abide by. Some guidelines that you should include are don’t plug other communities and don’t promote yourself or your blog.
Step 2: Set the stage for your community
Before inviting people or promoting your community, create some posts to guide the conversation of the community. Use a visual and post something that would be engaging to the members of your community. You can pin these posts to the community so they stay at the top of the page. This will ensure that every new member will see these posts as this is prime real estate on the community page. After you write a post, click on the drop down options on the top right of the post and click ” Pin Post.”
Step 3: Invite people to your community or share your community.
Once you are established, look to invite in influencers and make them moderators in the community.
Tips For Moderating a Google+ Community:
- Promote good community members to moderators to help out: Promote people you feel you can trust. Look out for people that you think can help you.
- Act on any spam that happens to get through the filters: Google+ has very good spam filters, but sometimes things get through. When you see spam you can choose to just remove the post, ban the member and remove or remove the post, ban the member and report the spam. Google+ filters will learn what you consider spam as you take action on spam.
- Use Pinnable posts: Pinnable posts can be used to feature community member’s posts or to provide a weekly digest of what is going on in the community.
- Create a resource list to reference when people ask questions and make it available for download on Google Drive
- Make the community experience about the community members
