7 Clever Ways To Gain Followers On Your Google Business Page

Google business pages are fast becoming the must-use social networking tool for savvy business owners wanting to grow their company online. Use this platform to build your social presence and connect with customers, gain new followers and actively market your brand, whilst improving your network of contacts at the same time.

If you're making the most of your social network then it shouldn't be too difficult to attract new followers to your business page. To maximise the potential of your Google Plus presence, use these seven proven practices to gain a healthy following and generate positive results.

1. Create a captivating headline

Make posts SEO-friendly and start with a dynamic headline. Capture the imagination of the reader with a punchy opening statement.  Make it informative, catchy and hard to resist and you’ll attract attention from the off.

Amazing headlines are enticing, informative and speak directly to the reader. Optimise them with keywords and outline the reader’s expectations from the beginning. Give them a reason to want to want to read your post and follow you online.

Headlines fall into a number of categories. Examples of these are:

• Lists... ‘10 ways to enhance you Google presence’
• How to’s... ‘How to add images to Google My Business in easy steps’
• Calls to action – ‘Do this to improve your social networking skills’
• Informative – ‘Try these suggestions and grow your business online’

Use power words to drive attention to your headline. ‘Mind-blowing’, ‘Amazing’, ‘Jaw-dropping’ or ‘Surprising’ are just a few examples you might want to try.

2. Grab attention with quality imagery

Badly taken photographs have a negative impact online. Blurry, out-of-focus shots taken with a low resolution camera or smartphone are unlikely to do your products and services any favours.

Google provides you with the perfect medium to share pictures, and it has a very useful editing tool too. Use this to your full advantage, pick good quality images to grab attention and make full use of Google’s ‘Auto Awesome’ and ‘Auto Enhance’ functions, they’ll magically create captivating images ready for you to share with followers online.

Make the experience visually appealing for your followers to generate a loyal fan base.

3. Format the text

Carefully configure the text on your business page. It’s worth spending a little time optimising this area before you start posting content to readers. Populate your page with quality content and carefully format the text using the full array of tools at your disposal.

Tips to help you format text include using bold, italics or strike-through for posts. Hints to help you achieve this include:

• Use two asterisks around text to create a bold impression: *bold*
• Place two underscores either side of text to turn it into italic: _italic_
• Place text between two hyphens to add a strike-through: -
strikethrough-

You could create numerical lists or bullet points for posts making them easy to read for interested parties. Like the one above! Or get text noticed using hashtags.

4. Make the experience engaging using ‘poll' features on posts

Get people involved with your page. Use polls, surveys or simply post a few questions to generate comments and expand the amount of interest shown in your page. The more user-interaction you create on your page the greater chance you have of building a healthy following.

Polls are good devices to gain opinion. You can use them to get feedback from your friends about the latest Broadchurch episode or create a debate about a hot topic within your industry. Start a poll, get followers involved and this could spread to their wider circles creating a host of new followers for your page.

5. Follow relevant people/businesses to encourage followers back

Spend time searching for movers and shakers within your industry. Start to follow people that are relevant to your business or simply look for people that seem to be on the same wavelength as you. When you find articles of interest use the +1 function, share posts and add positive comments to actively engage with the wider community.

Add people or businesses to your circles to gain a healthier exposure. Start following as many people as you can and a high proportion of them should follow you back.

6. Give something away for free

Regularly keep your Google page updated with offers and promotions from your business. You could encourage followers to share your page and make the community aware of your freebies, driving interest to your site with the promise of great giveaways.

GMB is a great place to advertise future offers. Post comments with links to your site and use regular promotions to attract a new following.

7. Check for trending topics using the ‘explore’ feature

Keep up to date with hot topics within your target industry. See what’s trending at the moment and use this as a basis for future posts.

Do a little digging, read current posts from the wider community to establish useful subjects and themes, whether they are related to your industry or not. It’s okay to post something that’s a little off-the-wall from time to time to encourage a new following. Use trending topics to link and connect with other people.

What tips will you be using to gain new followers on Google in 2015? Tell us at Add People, we’d love to hear your comments!