On Tuesday, Bradley Horowitz, VP of product for Google+ had said in an interview that “improvements and exciting times lay ahead for Google +” and, as if on cue, on Wednesday, Google announced two new features which are slated to make its +1 feature even more useful to users and publishers. Google has introduced the +1 button to Google+ Circles and provided a customized snippet when the +1 button is used.
Introduced in June of this year, the +1 button is now on a million sites and appears in 4 billion impressions, every day. Impressive figures, but curiously, from the user’s point of view, who clicked the +1 button it was a reward-less task, in the sense that they could not see as to what they had accomplished by clicking on the +1 button. All that is set to change with the introduction of these two new features.
Sharing with your Google+ Circles
Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president engineering explained this new feature in the Google official blog post. “ We are making it easy for Google+ users to share webpages with their Circle, directly from the +1 button. Just +1 a page as usual and look for the new “Share on Google+” option. From there you can comment, choose a circle and share. This is a big, if obvious, step forward for Google’s +1 button, as it gives users a much bigger incentive to click on them.
Earlier, clicking the +1 button only shared content to a tab on a user’s Google+ profile. As against this, when a user clicks on the Facebook ‘Like’ button, the article is posted on the user’s Facebook wall. Now, with its own social network, the search giant can match the social network giant’s button functionality.
Google+ Snippets
Google also announced the addition of +snippets to the +1 button. A + snippet is the link, image and description automatically generated when a link is shared on Google+. Now, Google is allowing publishers to designate exactly which text they would like to include within these + snippets. Publishers can customize the code of their +1 button to get what is displayed in a + snippet. You can also use inline annotations which help engagement after users see a friend’s recommendation right on their page.
The + 1 button opens up your site to a valuable new source of traffic with sharing on Google+. + Snippets lets you put your best face forward by customizing exactly what appears when your content is shared. Snippets can be a jumpstart for a conversation.
Publishers can benefit from +snippets. With just a few changes to their webpages, publishers can actually customize their +snippets and encourage more sharing of their content on Google+.
This implies an escalation for Google’s +1 button, as it gives users an incentive to click on them.
Inline Annotations
Now, when a person visits a page that someone they know has +1’d, they can see a name and a face reminding them to pay special attention to your content. Inline annotations let people see which of their friends +1’d your content. Here is how it will look:
To add inline annotations, you need to update your +1 button code. Visit the configuration tool, select ‘inline’ from the ‘Annotation’ menu and grab a new snippet of code.
Google will be rolling out both the sharing from +1 and inline annotations fully over the next few days. If you want to test these improvements right now, you can join Google’s Platform Preview group.
You can view the video below which tells you how the Google+1 button will help you share with Google+ Circles and how you can use the snippet feature:
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