I’ve got a warning for all the Google+ communities out there – stay relevant!
This past Tuesday I decided to go to all my Google+ communities and do some marketing work, collect some links for Midweek Content Roundup, and post some comments on interesting things I saw. I do this nearly every day, and have been for months and months.
One group that I decided to visit on this day was Author Rank and Google Authorship, a group I’ve been a member of since about April if not earlier.
This past Tuesday I decided to go to all my Google+ communities and do some marketing work, collect some links for Midweek Content Roundup, and post some comments on interesting things I saw. I do this nearly every day, and have been for months and months.
One group that I decided to visit on this day was Author Rank and Google Authorship, a group I’ve been a member of since about April if not earlier.
The group is quite large – it has nearly 23,000 members – and I could often find some useful SEO information there. Lately, however, I’d begun to notice that there was less engagement, and I was seeing the same things over and over. I decided to make a comment on this:
As you can see, I got some engagement on that post, the first this group had seen in some time. Well, that was too much for the moderator of this group, someone or something named Digital Marketing.
Now, this moderator was not the same moderator as when I joined this group. The original moderator left, and that may explain why my post was deleted and I was kicked out of the community, no notice whatsoever.
See, I’d challenged the authority and the very existence of that group and that moderator. They were not doing a very good job, and anyone that wants to visit that group can tell that fact quickly. Here’s just a few screenshots of what that group looks like:
Now, this moderator was not the same moderator as when I joined this group. The original moderator left, and that may explain why my post was deleted and I was kicked out of the community, no notice whatsoever.
See, I’d challenged the authority and the very existence of that group and that moderator. They were not doing a very good job, and anyone that wants to visit that group can tell that fact quickly. Here’s just a few screenshots of what that group looks like:
Here is the group’s top page, or the beginning of the infinite scroll. It looks like there’s been a new post just today, a few hours ago. But let’s scroll down that page:
Just a few posts later you can see that this group has only had a few posts in a month’s time. Right there below that post today (October 25) is a post going back to September 26. Scroll down a bit more and you see this:
There’s a post going back to September 9, just a few posts down from the post made today.
Now, an engaged group with 23,000 members will have a few posts a minute, and people will comment on them. Here you can see that there’s very few comments and very little in the way of +1’s even. No, this group is dead.
So I said that, because I’m one of those people that would rather have a problem pointed out before it sinks the ship than after. This moderator Digital Marketing isn’t one of those folks, and that’s how I know all their endeavors will fail.
Don’t be like Digital Marketing – I can’t see what posts they make because they’ve blocked me – and keep an open mind. If people point out problems, don’t turn a blind eye, a deaf ear, or block them on social media. Don’t put your head in the sand and hope things get better. Take a listen and take a look – it might be just what you need.
Now, an engaged group with 23,000 members will have a few posts a minute, and people will comment on them. Here you can see that there’s very few comments and very little in the way of +1’s even. No, this group is dead.
So I said that, because I’m one of those people that would rather have a problem pointed out before it sinks the ship than after. This moderator Digital Marketing isn’t one of those folks, and that’s how I know all their endeavors will fail.
Don’t be like Digital Marketing – I can’t see what posts they make because they’ve blocked me – and keep an open mind. If people point out problems, don’t turn a blind eye, a deaf ear, or block them on social media. Don’t put your head in the sand and hope things get better. Take a listen and take a look – it might be just what you need.
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