Tim Morgan via CompfightSmart email marketers know that one of the reasons that channel can be so powerful is the ability to target content at segments of your brands’ following who are inherently receptive to that content. Your audience can opt in to a variety of newsletters centered around main interests. That way, they are choosingto get the content, rather than having the content pushed at them.
Recently Google Plus added a new feature that allows users to “subscribe” to any of their circles. The user gets notified of any new posts by anyone (or any page) in that circle. If the user has email notifications activated, she even gets the posts in her Gmail inbox, just like “real” email! For more about this feature see “Major Changes to Google Plus Notifications linked at the bottom of this post.
It occurred to me that this new feature could solve two problems with one stone: Google+ users would like to be able to get topical content from some other users or Pages without getting their off-topic posts, and content publishers would love to be able to target specific content at users who want to get it. Sure you could do the latter by placing those people in a circle and then checking the box to notify them of your posts as you post them, but such notification circles are limited in size by Google+.
I’m proposing a method that uses easy-to-create Google+ Pages in combination with the new subscribe to circles feature to simulate opt-in targeted email lists. It involves a little bit of user education, but you users will thank you for that, as many of them are probably unaware of how the new subscription feature works, or even that it exists.
For complete details on how to implement this strategy, see my article “Build Your Google+ Page Following with Topical Pages“
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