With more than 250  million users, Google+ has proved its popularity and has asserted that it deserves SMB’s (Small and Medium-Sized Businesses) content marketing plan and time investment. Because of that, many small businesses are using Google+ to market their product. Though Google+ is still new, using its content marketing strategy  is the best way to kick start your business. Here are six ways to find success in your business using this social networking site .

Use formatting to grab reader’s attention

Though content of your website is crucial, your site will attract more people only if you format the content effectively. If your site suffers from poor display and readability problems, the visitors will not be able to process the content easily.  The content on Google+ keeps changing rapidly, making it essential to format the updates for effective readability and visibility. Google+ allows you to make your content pop up on  the viewer’s Google+ timeline through formatting codes for ‘bold’, ‘italic’ and ‘strike-through’.

Include Hashtags and +Mentions

Since, most entrepreneurs are on Google+ to improve their brand awareness and visibility, it offers two features called hashtags and +Mentions. These features help you increase traffic and brand awareness for your site. Mention is a feature similar to ‘@’ing ‘ option on Facebook and Twitter. The main purpose behind developing +Mention is to let brands and people know that you have mentioned them on your wall so that they might share the content with other people.

Hashtags have now become an important aspect of internet overnight. Hashtags are used in   social media sites like Twitter helping us understand online conversations. When you attach hashtags to your status updates, you will see that Google immediately links the hashtag to the search results for your Google+ query. You can attract more traffic if you link your status to Google+ queries.

Visuals are important

You can improve the content marketing technique by sharing images. Google+ places lot of importance on photos. You can also create images that suit the content of your blog articles and share it. You can attract more users to your site by sharing personal information about your office and staff.

Make use of targeted sharing

The best feature about Google+ is that it allows you to share content within the segmented circles that you create. You have the option of defining your audience and also provide content specifically targeted to them. You can create segmented circles like customers, blog commenters, local businesses and vendors. After you create your circles, you can make them visible to everyone and share content.

Participate in real-time conversations

Google+ offers a special feature where you can have conversations with your visitors using the real-time chat facility. You can post questions, blogs, advertise your product on your wall and get responses from visitors instantly. Before expanding your content ideas, make sure you know what your audience expect from you. You can market your product better by posting videos and adding links to your site.

Grace is a senior writer with  Godot Media, a content writing service firm. She is a talented copywriter  and her interests ranges from social media, blogging to following web technologies and trends.