Google+ Adds Two New Share Features

Since its rollout not too long ago in June, the Google+ button appears on over 1 million sites and has reached more than 4 billion views. Google+ originally launched as a social tool to easily share and recommend information across the Internet. The social platform has just added two new features improving its content sharing capabilities.

Sharing Content With Your Google+ Circles

Google+ has taken sharing information to the next level – users can now choose which circles to share it with. When you +1 something as usual, there is now an option to “Share on Google+.” Choose the appropriate circle, leave a comment if you wish, and the link is instantly shared.

+Snippets

This feature is meant to make shared links more enticing to others. Users can customize links by choosing an image and writing a description of the content in the link’s sharebox, allowing them to tailor the information they’d like displayed.

What This Means for Businesses

While Facebook is the most popular social site for small businesses, it also has the lowest customer satisfaction rate. Companies can make a Facebook Business page, but the social site makes it difficult to filter information to a targeted audience. For example, Facebook users typically “Like” a combination of pages for business, personal interests, causes, products, services, etc. Consequently, information is shared in one central stream on the user’s feed with no real direction. When Facebook users receive this overwhelming amount of content that is possibly irrelevant to them, they are more likely to hide updates from certain pages all together.

Google+ solves this problem by allowing users to choose which circles to share with (i.e. business news with coworkers and colleagues; information on personal interests with family and friends). This allows circles to start conversations quickly, make useful information more accessible, and keep it contained within the appropriate social circles.

See the official Google blog post here.