How Can Designers Benefit from Google+
Only recently, Google launched another social networking site by the name of Google+ and many are wondering how successful it would be in overtaking Facebook. The real question is what features does Google+ offer that other social networking sites do not. The answer is that Google has created a product that can offer great benefit to designers. I personally know many designers who have signed up and are taking advantage of its features to promote themselves and their work. If you haven’t signed up already, here’s a list of the ways in which it can benefit you:
- “Sparks” for your daily dose of inspiration
Through Sparks, Google+’ offers you the latest search results on the topics that you specify at any time you want. These search results are the most popular and latest results from the most highly ranked websites, ensuring relevancy to what you are searching for. This feature not only makes searching easier, it also allows you to share it with others in your social circles from right within Google+ itself. This allows you not only to get inspired, but also to share this inspiration easier
- Easy communication with clients and other designers through “Circles”
Through this feature, you can very easily create groups (called “Circles”) and select topics of discussion that you think would interest them. Through Circles you can easily separate your professional contacts and communications from your personal ones. In this way you can have a separate circle for your clients and a separate one for fellow designers and colleagues. This way you can carry out exclusive communication with each group, and can ask other designers for advice and opinions without your clients ever getting to know about it.
- 3. “Hangouts” to help you develop and nurture social relationships with other designers
The Hangouts feature allows you to conduct video chats with fellow designers, which makes chatting and interacting a lot of fun. This video chatting functionality also helps you to extend and develop your network by keeping in touch with other people from the design community. This will help you to build and nurture business relationships that will help you in the long run and prove to be a vital source of advice and help.
4. Provides you the facility of showcasing your designs in a better way
Designers can display their portfolio in a very creative way using the display and sizing variation features offered by Google+. In addition, Google+ also offers basic image editing functionality which can allow you to enhance the quality of the images you want to display as well as apply up to six different effects to them.
5. Access other Google services while working.
Google+ integrates other Google services, including Gmail and Google Docs and Calendar right within the social networking site itself. This helps you to enhance your productivity preventing the need for you to switch in and out of Google+. This also allows you to get email and other notifications right there and then within the same window, reducing distractions and enhancing your collaboration efforts.
6. Follow other designers easily.
You can very easily follow other professionals in your field or search for them. The following feature helps to keep you up-to-date with the latest developments in the field, allowing you to get inspiration, tips and ideas for better designs.
7. Lets you create a vanity URL for easy sharing.
Because you will be given a long Google+ URL, it would be difficult to share it. You just need to use a URL shortening service such as Gplus.to which allows you to easily obtain a vanity URL that is shorter and easier to share, so that you can promote yourself more easily to prospective clients and other members of the design community.
8. Greater privacy and security for your personal data.
By making use of Google+’s “Data Liberation” feature, you can decide for yourself which information you want to keep private and which information you want to share with others. You can also prevent others from distributing your work by enabling the “disable reshare” feature if you so desire.
9. Avoidance of information overload through the “Stream” feature
It is only natural to be annoyed when you are bombarded with information that is not relevant to you, and you might end up missing important information in the sea that faces you. In order to eliminate this problem, Google+ presents a feature by the name of “Stream” (the equivalent of Facebook’s News Feed) through which you can filter the information that you see. Using this feature you can also select the people you want to offer information to.
The question still remains whether Google+ can become the social networking giant of the future. Currently it is only in testing so it is not easy to comment on this.
