Fitting Google+ Into My Social Media Mix

Today I finally got access to Google­Plus and leapt in set­ting up my cir­cles etc. Putting aside the fact that a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the peo­ple I fol­low aren’t on there yet, it seems like a very slick ser­vice and I think it has a lot of poten­tial. But there’s a fair amount of mud­dle in there too.

+1, Com­ment, Like, Share

Google are attempt­ing to link many of their exist­ing ser­vices together with Google Plus and this makes a lot of sense, but at the moment it also seems to be lead­ing to some redun­dancy and for me at least, con­fu­sion. For exam­ple on my pro­file I now have a Posts page which lists the stuff I’m specif­i­cally shar­ing in Google+.  These items can be +1’d Com­mented or Shared.

Then I have my +1 page which lists the stuff that I have +1’d around the web, but not the stuff that I’ve +1’d on Google+. Since a +1 is not a share as such, I haven’t shared these items in Google+, but the link will be vis­i­ble through my profile.

And then there’s Google Buzz which con­tains all my Google Reader shares. Although they are shares, they have not been shared in Google+, only in Reader and Buzz. These items can be Liked or Com­mented but there doesn’t seem to be any way to share them in Google+ from this screen.

Can you under­stand my confusion?

Where to Share?

On top of the ques­tion of how best to share things in Google+, there’s the mat­ter of how to con­nect it to my other social net­works.  This is my cur­rent arrangement:

• Reader Shares are piped into Buzz and from there into Twitter
• Reader Shares also go to my blog as a Daily Link Digest
• Blog Posts are piped into Twitter
• My Twit­ter Feed is posted as a digest on my blog (a lit­tle recur­sive, but not too much)
• My pho­tos are posted via Pos­ter­ous to Tum­blr, Flickr, Picassa, Face­book and my Blog (so they also end up on Twitter)

So where does that leave Google Plus?

That’s what I’m try­ing to fig­ure out. The Cir­cles struc­ture means that I can aim my posts very specif­i­cally in Google+ which will allow me to main­tain groups for Tech, SciFi, Pho­tog­ra­phy etc. But how I’m going to con­nect that con­tent to the rest of my social sites is a big vague right now.

Sug­ges­tions anyone?

Related arti­cles

• Google+ or 1+ or some­thing (erni​ethe​at​tor​ney​.net)
• Google Plus as Google’s glue (char​man​-ander​son​.com)
• First thoughts on Google Plus (gau​tam​blogs​.com)
• The story so far: Google+ (mmit​blog​.word​press​.com)
• Google+ Pro­files Will Be Pub­lic: Google To Ter­mi­nate All Pri­vate Pro­files After July 31^st (searchengineland​.com)
• Thoughts on Google+… (shan​non​turling​ton​.com)
• The Google Plus 50 (chris​bro​gan​.com)