Google+ and REI Professionals: How Are You Not On Board? Seriously?!

I know I know. Google+ seems to rhyme with Myspace when we think of social media and dammit I'm a REI professional (no not me, you) not a 15 year old kid looking for a booty call. I make my connects out on the streets. Or maybe you think Facebook is where it's at. The same Facebook that reaches less than 10% of your followers right. Mmmmhmmmm. Google+ was late to the party so it's taken a backseat to the likes of Facebook (no pun intended), but I'm here to tell you that you're crazy if you're not on Google+ yet.

Facebook Sucks Now. Google+ Rocks!

Alright first of all, I'm gonna say this point blank, Facebook sucks now. Burn me at the stake, I don't care. They only allow you to have 5,000 friends in your network before forcing you to convert to a fan page. The whole way along building your network they are penalizing you if you don't know the person you're adding by putting you in timeout from adding people. Hellooooo!! You're a "social network". If the person doesn't want to be friends they can DING DING DING not add me or block me. Btw, they do this the whole way so as to force you into their pay model fan pages.

Google+ rocks though. Guess what? Add as many people as you want. Granted you can only add like 500 people a day if you're a friend collector, but still, no penalties. You can be like a few people I know who have built followings of 50k-100k people like Mark Traphagen or Andrij Harasewych. Or you can be like a couple of real estate professional I know like Rebekah Radice and Bill Gassett who have close to 10k followers. When these professionals post a link to their website content it goes platinum.

You're A REI Professional. Wanna See Google+ Numbers?

Of course I'm dealing with REI professionals here so you'll definitely want to see the numbers on Google+ before committing your most valuable resource of time to it. So let's start with their user base. Google+ just surpassed the 1 billion marker, behind Facebooks 1.15 billion. Not bad considering they were around 500 million a year ago. Plus, Google+ has a much cleaner interface. It's so much more organized than Facebook's who's in desperate need of a makeover.

Here's an article from Mark Traphagen on the Personalized Power of +1's on your content ("+1" is to Google+ what "Likes" are to Facebook). Also, this article by Eric Enge on The Power of +1's on Your Contents Search Ranking was fascinating, but very very very in depth. The experiment was conducted over several months with an extreme control group. Let me tell you something, it's right on the money. I only wrote 10 blog posts on my old website up until August 18th before migrating to my new one where I will start writing probably tomorrow. Those 10 blog posts got most of their attention on Google+ with 10-20 +1's per article. Since around September 20th I've had a steady stream of 150+ new people register there to receive new posts as I write them (they'll be waiting a while unfortunately since I migrated). This came from the power of +1's and shares on Google+. My Facebook network of 2,000 people on it's messy interface Liked my content a total of 5 times, so I don't believe those 5 likes were the reason for my success.

Final Thoughts on Google+

Google's always been a bit biased in promoting users that operate from their platforms (except with Wordpress), and who can blame them. I have no doubt users receive far more love from Google than other social platforms, and the experiment proves this to be true. Everytime a user +1's a person's content, Googlebot immediately recrawls that content. If you read the experiment you'll see this is fact. You can also embed live high quality Google+ post right into your own web content (Facebook copied this idea right after. Who's on who's coattails now?). So with all of this new information one could easily see why I must reiterate my earlier point: how are you not on Google+ yet?

You're very own Joshua Dorkin just reinvented his Google+ community BiggerPockets.com Real Estate Investing Community. If you support him and his site then helping him to grow on Google+ will help to gain new membership here. Afterall, isn't that what it's really all about here on BP?

Last but not least, I'll be starting my own blog on my site (blogging here and there), so if you like what you see here you can read others like it on my blog "We Blog Houses," and please don't forget to take a second and share this on your social networks!

Cheerio mates!!

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