Before you jump to the review, check out this amazing Social Resolutions 2012 infographic from the official Google+ Business page. These are GREAT social media marketing tips that we recommend printing and putting up at the office.

1. Keep your page fresh
2. Post quality, not quantity
3. Ask for interaction
4. Hangout with your customers
5. Post lots of images

Amazing infographic from the official page for businesses using Google+ to connect with their customers.

Google+ Business Sharing Tips – Start real conversations with the right people

• A quick look at sharing on Google+ – Google+ Pages help you build deeper relationships with customers by sharing your thoughts, links, photos and promotions with the right people at the right times.
• Publish Posts – Once you have people on your page, how do you start talking to them? You can use your Stream to post relevant content, including photos and videos, and even engage your followers directly by asking questions that start discussions.
• Launch Hangouts – Hangouts let you set up one-click video conversations with customers and colleagues alike.
• Manage Circles – Different people are interested in different parts of your business. Google+ lets you easily share the right things with the right customers.

Google+ Business Promotion Tips – Social sharing. Google reach.

• Spread the word – There are lots of ways to promote your site and your Google+ page, from promoting it yourself with Google+ Direct Connect and the Google+ badge, to helping others recommend you with the +1 button.
• Google+ badge – Let people know you’re here by connecting your company website to your Google+ Page by adding the Google+ badge to your site.
• Google+ Direct Connect – A new feature called Direct Connect makes it easy — even automatic — for people to connect with you. Direct Connect lets people enter ‘+’ followed by the name of your page in Google search to get directly to your Google+ page. You can learn more about Direct Connect in our help center.
• +1 recommendations – People often turn to friends and family for help making decisions. Get the +1 button.
• Connect your +1’s – Help people see their friends’ recommendations, wherever they find you on the web by connecting +1s for your website, with +1s on your Google+ page and ads.
• +1 on search – A recommendation is good; a recommendation from a friend is even better. +1 annotations in Google search help surface these recommendations right when people need them most — when they’re searching for exactly that information.
• +1 button sharing to Google – Help your words get around by installing the +1 button on any of your web pages, so that when a visitor to that page clicks a +1 button, that specific content is shared on Google+, where people can discuss it with friends and reshare it with their own social networks.
• +1 on display ads – People tend to trust recommendations from people they already know. Adding the +1 button to your display ads lets you, for the first time, run social-enabled campaigns across millions of sites in more than 40 countries around the world.

Google+ Business Analytics Tips – Get in the know

• Understand your Google+ activity – Google’s measurement tools will soon make it easier to understand Google+ activity: what people are saying about your business, how many +1’s your business receives and how these affect your traffic.
• Google+ search – Search on Google+ can help you as much as it helps your customers. You can search keywords, names or anything else, and use your search results to understand better what people are saying about your brand.
• Ripples – Word travels fast online. Ripples let you see your posts spread across Google+, who’s sharing and resharing your content, and whose opinions matter.
• Social analytics – How do +1’s affect user behavior? Google Analytics suite of social reports make it easy to find out.
• Analytics on a Page – Data trumps guessing every time. In the coming weeks Google+ will be launching tools to give you access to as much data as possible about your Google+ Page and +1 activity.
• API integrations – Ready to start building for the Google+ platform? This first release of the Google+ API, which includes read access to public data and a hangouts API should be helpful.

You can find Web Marketing Therapy on Google Plus and you can find my Google Plus profile here: Nicki Gauthier Google Plus profile.

And you can thank the Hello Giggles Team for this beautiful delight: ‪What Are You Doing New Years Eve? by Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt‬. Zooey’s voice is heavenly and Joseph is too handsome for words. You can find HG on Facebook and Twitter. Their YouTube channel is VERY entertaining (I especially enjoy Molls’ Five Favorite Things of the Week.) And here is Joseph’s amazing site: http://hitrecord.org/.

• Add your favorite content: From leading publications, to blogs you follow, you can browse, read, and share favorite content, presented in a swipable magazine format.
• Follow trending stories: Let the breaking stories find you. Personalized “trends” pulls articles, photos and videos into living editions, surfacing new stories as they unfold.
• Designed for all your devices: Whether sitting on your couch, riding a train or plane, your Currents content is ready for high-speed reading on your Android or Apple phone or tablet.

There is a similar app called Flipboard which was released in 2010 and claims to be the first social magazine. It allows you to “flip” through content like it is a magazine and is available for the iPad and iPhone only. I LOVE this app and I use it on my iPad daily! My favorite Flipboard publications are: The Sartorialist, Rachel Zoe, and The Glamourai. Apple positively reviewed Flipboard and named it Apple’s iPad App of the Year in 2010.  I recently added Flipboard to my iPhone and now I have a “pocket-sized social magazine.”

The 12 chapter course featured exclusively on lynda.com outlines the fundamentals of online marketing in easy to understand and informational video tutorials. Lorrie rocks the tutorial socks off of me in this super smart and fun course. And just a little FYI: Lorrie was a whopping 8 months pregnant during the filming!

Online Marketing Fundamentals introduces web marketers, web designers, business owners and executives to the world of online marketing, and reviews how the different aspects of a business’ web site can support its marketing goals. Course highlights include information on:

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For those of you who do not know yet, lynda.com is a subscription based, online, video tutorial website chock full of amazing education. The lynda.com service is an exceptional value of only $25 a month and features a plethora of fun, easy to learn, video tutorials to help you in many aspects of your techy life!

If you aren’t a lynda.com  member yet you can still get a sneak peak of Lorrie’s course introduction and some other snippets from Online Marketing Fundamentals.

The Wild Web Women love lynda.com: Mary Sandor, Lorrie Thomas, Jennie Jacobs, Darla Bea Smith

As a designer,  I love all of the great InDesign and Illustrator tutorials on lynda.com for helping me to quickly learn an underutilized tool or tip in the programs. Another great feature: the Creative Inspirations documentaries on the site. The entertaining series allows you to get insight into the worlds of your favorite artists, photographers and more.

Basically, Web Marketing Therapy loves lynda.com and we think you will too! Check out the course today and let us know what you think about it below in our comments section!