In the latest episode of my podcast, I included Circloscope on a list of 5 tools that can help us achieve “social media nirvana”. Of course, no one can say exactly what this “nirvana” would look like. But in my head I envision a clutter free stream, that's brimming with valuable content, that I'm truly interested in reading.
However, back in the real world, we all know that it's important to take time out to clean-up our streams so we can focus more of our attention to engagement. There are plenty of tools that can help us build an engaged following on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Yet in the case of Google+, there's only one tool that will save time and simplify the cleansing process and that tool is Circloscope.
Why Do We Need Circloscope?
Christine DeGraff and Craig Fifield took over development of this wonderful Google Chrome extension earlier this year and at the beginning of each training video you'll hear Christine say:
“Circloscope is a powerful circle management tool, that can help you grow and active and engaged following on Google plus.”
One of the challenges of building an engaged following on Google+ is that finding people who are active on the platform can take up a lot of time. You can do some keyword searches and look for interesting people that way but you can't sort those results by date. Even when you do find some great, relevant content, it may be from an old post. In this case, there's a chance that many of the people who interacted with that piece of content, have no idea how to use Google plus and have abandoned the platform months ago.
As you'll see in the video I recorded below, Circloscope makes the process of finding active, relevant people to add to your circles a breeze.
Then there's the issue of follower count limits. That's where I messed up!
I shared the story on my podcast, of how I was adding everyone who subscribed to my email list to my G+ circles. Turns out that was a bad idea. Before I realized it, I reached the 5,000 max following limit and I was forced to un-circle people one-by-one. That was no fun at all.
Using Circloscope, I was able to finish the rest of the task in about 3 minutes. Once my profile was loaded into the tool, I removed all the “blue-heads” and inactive accounts in a flash.
Dealing with HOA event comments is another challenge we Plussers are faced with. Navigating through an endless scroll of comments, looking for a way to acknowledge and thank everyone who attended our events was a very daunting and tedious task.
Finding HOA event attendees is one of the most powerful features of Circloscope. The beauty of it is that, you don't even need to host your own HOA events in order to make this feature work to your advantage. When you watch the video you'll see exactly what I mean.
Without further ado, here's the video I promised called How To Use Circloscope for Your Google+ Business Page or Profile (don't forget, you can read the transcript below!).
- Relationships – see who has added you to circles or not and discover who you have in your circles that is inactive.
- White Lists – put people on your White List if you want to make sure they remain in your circles when you're purging other accounts.
- Post Engagement – find out who is already engaging with your content – you can check up to 40 of your last posts – or someone else's if you want!
- HOA Event Engagement – search Google+ for relevant events and come back and plug the URL into Circloscope. Bam! Sounds like a perfect recipe for success if you ask me
- Communities – create a circle of active community members! Or find out who isn't active – it's up to you!
Plan Your Circloscope Strategy
Before you go, I'd like to share some additional thoughts about having all this new found Google+ power. I suggest you take some time to map out a strategy for what you'd like to do with your Google+ account. Think about the type of content you intend to share and decide whether or not you're going to take on a fresh approach to your interactions on the platform. It's a fun place to hang out but you don't want to bit off more than you can chew. I gave you a few ideas already but here are a few more examples from some other popular Plussers who are already using Circloscope:
- Circloscope: Exporting Lists and Importing Into Google Drive from Susan Finch
- Circloscope Master Class – Google+ Targeted Following from Wade Harman
- Google Plus Circle Management Success Tools and Tips from Krishna De
- Circloscope Ultimate Guide and Tutorial Part 1 and Part 2 from Dexter Roona
- Circloscope has Launched: Building Your Engagement the Right Way with Lany Sullivan
- Circloscope Tutorial – Adding Followers From a Community to Your Google+ Circles from Tony Grant
If you have a great tutorial for Circloscope, let me know in the comments and I'll be sure to add it to the list.
Video Transcript
Hi everyone Ileane Smith here
Guess what – Time to clean up your Google plus Circles. Circloscope – it's the only Google+ circle management tool that's gonna let you find inactive users people who don't follow you back, and those annoying blue heads – meaning people that haven't even uploaded a profile picture to their account.
Before I start showing you the tutorial for using Circloscope, I want to show you some social proof so to speak these are the results that I'm getting growing my following on my Basic Block Tips Google+ Page, which was something that I had sort of ignored. I mean I was posting to the page but I wasn't really trying to reach out and expand my network there.
So now that I have Circloscope I'm able to and add some targeted people to circles when I say targeted I mean that they have shown interest in events or in people or posts that I know are the type of content that I produce.
I'm added some of those people to my circles and now it's time to see how many of them or if any of them are adding me back. So this 23 is probably the most I ever had in one day of notifications here on my page. It looks more like what I would have on my profile. So see “added you back”, “added you back”, “added you back”…
This proves that it's working because these people that I have added and in some cases they're pages. They're people who are active. Notice that they all have profile pictures or they have – as I mentioned earlier engaged with a post or an event. Look more – “added you back”, “added you back” and this is just in the last 24 hours or less since I started adding people using Circloscope.
Now let's go over and see how it's done. For this tutorial I would like to use the example of my friend Mia Voss. Mia has the Mia Connect Power Chat and she puts on the most fantastic events. And she gets a lot of engagement on her events. So this particular event she also happened to have some people that I'm know are very popular and have similar content. For example Cynthia Sanchez who is from Oh So Pinteresting, and my friend Renae Christine, who you may remember I did a YouTube collaboration with before.
Some of the other ladies they're all very – they all have a lot of authority in their areas of expertise and I know that the people that engaged with this particular event will probably be interested in my content. So we're going to grab the URL from this event and this is what we're going to use in Circloscope. So let's copy that.
OK so the suspense is over we're now finally over into the Circloscope dashboard and the first thing I want to do as I mentioned I want to focus on my page and not my profile. So we go in here and I'm going to change this over to my page. From the dashboard we want to go into events now of course I only want the people who are not in my circles. So I'm going to say they posted to this event. Put the URL in and there were 75 people. But we wanna add filters just to be on the safe side, and I want to show you how you can add filters, and there's several different choices you have here, and one of the things that I always suggest you do is not to include blue heads.
Pay attention, because this is really important, you have to click this twice to exclude them. See how that changed into an x-mark. Now if I wanted to I could say let's make sure these people are still active even though the event wasn't that long ago. But let's say we want to make sure they were active in last three weeks.
And so that's how you would do that. But you see here you have other choices – (months, days). Now if the event that you're going to use happened recently then you can just skip this part about activity because they were obviously active recently because the event just happened recently.
But in this case it was a couple of months ago so I'll say in the last three weeks. As you can see if you remember before was 75 now we're down to 64. okay. You see it makes a difference to go ahead and narrow down. So now I am NOT going to waste any time I him simply going to “select all”. See, I've selected all 64 and I'm going to “Add to circles”. Now I can add to an existing circle but in this case I want to remember that there's a Mia Connect Circle and it just confirms in case I did something wrong there. Now it's going to add those 64 people.
As I mentioned I know that Mia get's a lot of interaction so I may go and pick a couple of her other events. Because I'm not gonna have to worry about overlap because I'm going to tell the tool, let's go back to home page here you had different choices when it comes to events that only want the people that posted to the event that are not in my circles so now I could use that same event and come back and say the people that said that they may be going. Alright?
Or even the people there said that they're not going at least you know those people are active enough that they care enough that they say you know I'm not gonna just completely ignore this I'm gonna just let her know that I am NOT attending so that's how you do that when it comes to events and I would just repeat that a couple of times
the only thing – there is a limit. You can't add too many people in a 24-hour period, and since I don't have that many people in my circles I can't really add a lot. It varies by person so just go for it until to you get that little warning from Google + that'll tell you that you've added too many for that day.
And it will tell you wait 24 hours and then you can come back and add some more okay and in the end if you find that you've added a lot of people and they haven't added you back then you come in here and you just get rid of those that have not added you back simple enough.
You just come in here and say “Not following back” okay and that tell you do that. But remember in the meantime keep putting up relevant content to keep people interested in your page folks that's it for today but make sure you subscribe to this channel so you can keep up with all the latest in blogging, social media and YouTube. Talk to you soon. Peace
Give Circloscope and try and let me know what you think!
Ileane, Circloscope have only premium account? $47 Annual is cheap, but I’m curious about how much effective on targeted audience in Google Plus. I’m intrested in adding followers from community. thanks for interesting info about Circloscope.
Great question Noufal! You can use the Circloscope extension for free, however with the free version you will need to add or remove people from circles one at a time. It will take longer to get things done but, you’ll still get a taste for what the tool can do.
Get it from the Chrome Store here http://bit.ly/Wp5Spb
Hi
Thanks for sharing this informative article, To be honest before reading your post i was totally unaware from this extensions but after reading i have found it very helpful and useful.
Keep posting.
You’re welcome Sunny. I’m glad I introduced you to Circloscope. Let me know how you like it.
Those were truly helpful practical hints. I already wasted too much time trying to find the answers to those questions bothering everyone who has ever tried to build an engaged circle on Google +.
I say you with over 2000 follows on Google plus and i was very amazed. I guess i will have to invest in Circloscope to see if i can get more active Google+ followers
Thanks Ileane for sharing this nice feature. There are many sites to manage twitter followers but this is the first site for Google+. Thanks for sharing
Hi Ileane,
I watched the video, and thought it was great. However, I think I need a precursor to this one about page for brand and creating circles…And such because I haven’t really put much attention on Google Plus much…
Will check your channel for appropriate tutorials and then if I don’t see them, I will search. THEN, I will go get that Circloscope tool, it looks awesome!
Thanks so much for putting out this awesome video and keeping us in the loop about new useful tools. I really appreciate it! 🙂
Have a great weekend.
Carol Amato 🙂
Carol, the best way to get started with Google+ is to check out a few resources from people that teach everything from soup to nuts when it comes to setting up circles:
Ronnie Bincer
Martin Shervington http://www.plusyourbusiness.com/quickstarter-signup/
Stephan Hovanian’s Kindle ebook Google+ Pro Tips: Managing Your Google+ Circles
Google+ integrates nicely with YouTube and maintaining a circle of Google+ fans is simple to set up so they can get notifications from you in their inbox.
Thanks for stopping by Carol. Let me know if you have questions.
You’re awesome!!! Thanks so much, Ileane – you always over deliver…And I appreciate you sharing those links so very much.
You ain’t no stingy and greedy marketer, that’s for sure!
Sharing more of your stuff, lady! 🙂
Take Care,
Carol Amato
I’ve now changed my circles around quite a bit and just have a following circle for people I know won’t follow back but who are definitely worth reading. The key points I’ve taken out of this process is that the initial circles you set up when joining G+ may not necessarily be the final structure you use, and that active circle management is vital.
Hi Ileane, I think this tool, Circloscope would be of great help because G+ have got a lot of inactive users. If u consider a 100 people only a 30 of them would be using G+ at least weekly. So, when it comes to promotion, it’s important to avoid inactive users so that we can be sure that we are dealing with people who are actually ‘alive’.
This is a great tutorial I must confess, Google+ is a great tool for every blogger, also i want to believe that this Circloscope would be of great help to the system because now Google+ has too many dormant user accounts.
Google Plus is the next big thing, but the problem is that there are not many people interested with Google Plus. Still thanks a lot for sharing this cool article.
Hey Ileane,
I didn’t make Wade’s hangout where he was explaining more about this. I didn’t get the notice of the replay either so I totally forgot all about it.
I was just curious what the heck it even was so thanks for this video explanation.
I need to focus more on building my circles too. I definitely do not add everyone that adds me or that would be like my first Twitter profile that I deleted. The one question I have is that I’m assuming that it works best with the Chrome extension? I had to go back to FireFox, Chrome kept crashing on me for no reason and after going to their forum one girl tried to help me but none of what she suggested was happening. I just never know when it’s going to crash so I can’t use it anymore I’m afraid.
Thanks Ileane for this and I might try out the free version just to get an idea of what it is. You’re awesome and great stuff.
~Adrienne
Hey Adrienne,
That’s a great question. I really don’t think Circloscope works with any other browser besides Chrome but I’ll double check with Christine DeGraff just to be certain.
I whenever I think I missed an event I just go to the events link on G+ and see a list of all the one’s I’ve responded to. Give that a try next time.
Thank you Adrienne!
Hi ileane,
Awesome tips you got there… I would try implementing this tips and I would be so happy if it works well 🙂
Thanks for the share.
Hi I love posting on Google plus and from your discovery, I will love to start using Circloscope to ensure maximum conversion.
I hadn’t heard of this tool before, but it looks interesting. Building out my circles is something that I always mean to work on so I will look at this in more detail to see if it will be something I can use.
Good for you Kostas! Hope you enjoy getting more followers on Google+
We can’t use Circloscope with any other browser except Chrome. Great post! thanks for sharing….
Hi ileane,
This circloscope service looks promising. I am thinking to use it as my Google+ profile is quiet cluttered. It’s powerful circle management feature is awesome.
Thanks for this review. I will try it soon.
Nikhil, it’s super simple to remove all of the junk from your circles with Circloscope – when I say junk you know what I mean right? 🙂
great post! i might want to try this way
thanks
i liked the way you have put the sidebar in left while other blogs put in their right:)
Hello there!
I’m using Mozilla Firefox. So which extention should I use to get new followers on Google+? Can I use this extention for pages which have made on Google plus? Sorry I forgot to thank you. Thanks a lot for sharing such a useful article with us.
Thanks regards
Dilwar Singh
No, this extension only works with Chrome Dilwar. You’ll need to update your browser in order to use Circloscope.
Hello there!
I’m using Mozilla Firefox. So which extention should
You need Chrome because this is a Chrome extension. Firefox is no good for Circloscope.
Hey Ileane Smith, all the tips awesome… I would try to implementing this tips on my Google+. I say thank you so much for this helpful information
You’re welcome Rahul.
Thanks for sharing informative article. It’s contents really helpful for me and other also too. Circloscope is the best platform to manage your Google+ circles and increase new followers.
Thanks for sharing valuable post with us.
Hi Ileane, well this post of yours is really good one and unique as it tells the way to handle Google+ in a smart way. thanks a lot.
Google+ is a great tool for every blogger, also i want to believe that this Circloscope would be of great help to the system because now Google+ has too many dormant user accounts.
That a Really Great post I am also working on google plus but after verified i m not getting more followers 🙁
Hello there!
I’m using Mozilla Firefox. So which extention should
Awesome tips ; it will be help me a lot in feature.. Thanks Ileane…:)