Struggling to engage readers with your Google Plus Account – here is how to do this

Your facebook fan page is bustling with users’ activities and it is soul satisfying to see that all your hard work and sacrifices have finally started paying you off. But when you look around and see the Google Plus Profile, the dismal picture sucks out all the happiness of your heart. Yes, I know Google Plus is a different ball of Wax and marketers are still by and large clueless how to promote their brands via this new product from the house of Google. Though I am no expert, here I am going to give you some tips that you can give a go if you wish to see some difference in this dismal picture:

Follow People who are active: You should not be following people who might not be that much interested in your product or service. For say if you say if you are selling baby products, you should not be targeting teenagers because most perhaps they might not be interested in giving a thump-up to your Google Plus profile.  But yes, I am well aware of the difficulties associated with finding the targeted readers who will appreciate your hard work and will help you spread your words far and wide.  However, with “Google Plus” Search, thing can be made a little less harsh.

Just make a search with any keyword in the given search box located at the top of Google Plus and you will be flooded with real time updating stream.  And right below the Keyword in the search box, you will find another box asking you to specify the search. Just make a selection from the options available and you will have all the information at your disposal. Here we will be selecting “People and Pages” option from the Dropdown menu to have the details of all the people and pages that have the keywords we have targeted in their profiles.

Now, if you wish to find the most popular post around the topic, you can select “Spark” option or alternatively, you can select “Google+ Post” to find posts made around that keywords.

So, now you have got ample option to find targeted people who are most perhaps interested in what you share and what you sell.

Do Comment:  You know why people are not active on your Google Plus page? Because you do not encourage them to do so. To build a platform buzzing with activities of the users, you need to be actively involved in the process.  Just following the right people is not going to do the magic, you need to invest some time to interact with the targeted audience. Share some thought provoking insights and I believe they will start following you and your brands.

And whenever someone leaves a message in the Google Plus, you need to take some out of your busy schedule and get into the conversation. It will encourage them to come back to your Google Plus page again and again.

Be there in hangout: Doing a hangout is a great way to meet with new people and share your views. Moreover, it helps you build a great relationship with the targeted audience and give the whole marketing campaign a new lease of life. Face to face conversion is far more engaging and encouraging than just sending out ordinary press release or emails. This will make people connect to your brands and will forester a long lasting relationship.

Yes I know you may be introvert in nature but you should give “hangout a chance”. Now, if you do not know bean about where to start this hangout thing, do not stress. Just do it and you will just be awesome.

Produce something shocking and share worthy: Just sharing great quotes or articles on Google Plus page is not going to do the magic. To make the most of this beautiful and equally powerful platform, you need to come up with some awesome updates crafted by your own imagination.

Your updates should be adding some real value to visitors. You can easily draw attention of the visitors by doing something awkward or by sharing some controversial things without crossing the red line. The bottom-line is you need to get them dragged to the conversion by any means. So, add some spice in the updates, offer discount codes, share some videos etc.

Michael Evans is a passionate writer and he is a associated with Globalserve. He has written several articles on Cyprus Taxation.

Tags: Google Plus

Source : techtalkafrica[dot]com

Don’t be so cheap: Five reasons you should spend more on your next laptop

Low-cost laptops may look tempting, but the sacrifices you make to get there will often come back to bite you in the years of ownership ahead.

Sales figures from the last five years consistently show average laptop buyers spending about $600 dollars their new machines. This means that some people spend more, but it also means that a sizable number spend less.

Six Benjamin Franklins are not a ton of money for a laptop, although $600 may seem so when you’re at the store. For that money you’re limited to categories such as netbooks, multimedia laptops and a handful of ultraportables. Many of the laptops available at this price at adequate, but they’re just that. Adequate. OK. Usable. They are computers, and they will do computing stuff.

Cheaping out forces you to give up many tangible benefits, which means inexpensive laptops are often a poor value. You can’t get what you don’t pay for. Here’s why you should pay for more.

Durable goods

One of the first concepts you’ll learn in any basic economics or business class is that of durable goods. A durable good is an item that provides utility over a long period of time. Paying more for these items is justified if it can increase your productivity. A laptop is an example of such an item. A better, faster, more usable laptop can decrease the time you spend waiting for a video encode, increase your typing accuracy and eliminate wasting time waiting for programs to open.

This argument comes first because it’s the most important. Spending less money on a laptop can be tempting, but think about how often you use it. The American time use survey found that average computer owners use their computers for leisure about 25 minutes every day. If average users kept their laptops for just three years, they would use them for a total of 450 hours. And that includes no time working.

This is more time than an average American spends reading, relaxing or exercising. Suddenly, sacrificing a laptop’s quality to save a few hundred bucks seems like a poor value.

Eye on the warranty

One added benefit hiding in some expensive laptops is a better warranty. Asus throws in a two-year warranty against defects on its most expensive laptops. Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba and HP sometimes throw in an extended two- or three-year warranty to sweeten more expensive products. This is particularly common with business-oriented laptops such as the Lenovo ThinkPad, Dell Precision and Toshiba Portege.

Manufacturers don’t do this as a kindness. Squaretrade, a third-party warranty company, found that more expensive laptops have a small but measurable reliability advantage over their cheaper brethren. Netbooks, the cheapest of all laptops, have the highest failure rate by far. “Premium laptops,” defined as those selling for more than $1,000, are the least likely to fail.

Entertainment value

We’ve already established that average users will enjoy about 450 hours of laptop leisure time over three years. They will spend much of this time engaging in just-for-fun activities such as gaming or watching video.

Your laptop’s display serves as a window for all of this content, yet cheap laptops offer the worst displays among all modern consumer electronic devices. The resolution usually will be 1366 x 768, which is less than some modern tablets with much smaller displays. Contrast and viewing angles suffer as well.

You can do better only by spending more. Some cheap laptops offer a better display as an upgrade, but only premium laptops commonly come with high-quality displays as standard equipment.

The graphics processor is also a concern. Intel integrated graphics are fine for older games but work poorly with new 3D titles. You’ll want to upgrade to a discrete GPU from AMD or Nvidia to play new games, an option inexpensive laptops rarely offer.

Good on the go

Companies often slash battery life to make sure they can sell a laptop at a low price. Batteries are expensive, and no standards exist for validating battery life claims. This means a manufacturer can sell a laptop with a small battery while still advertising endurance that seems reasonable.

We’ve recorded this story time and time again. Almost every laptop we’ve received that seemed to be a great hardware value has achieved this goal by axing the battery. We rarely find a laptop under $600 that offers more than five hours of real-world battery life, and some will struggle to last a minute beyond four.

Spending for solid state

Dedicated readers of our laptop reviews may have noticed that one benchmark, PCMark 7, varies wildly between laptops that seem to have similar specifications.

The hard drive is the culprit. PCMark 7 tests all of a system’s components, and in the storage section of the test, laptops that have a solid-state drive dominate those which don’t. Equipping an SSD can bump the combined score by 1,000 to 2,000 points.

This is not merely an artifact of our benchmark. Systems with SSDs feel much more responsive because the drive responds more quickly to user input. These computers also enjoy much lower load times for both the operating system and the software.

You’ll only find an SSD in an expensive laptop, but it’s well worth the extra cash. Alternatively, you can buy a solid-state drive and upgrade it yourself. This will be cheaper but requires that you partially disassemble your laptop and re-install the operating system.

Conclusion

Our laptop reviews tell a consistent story. Expensive laptops often receive high scores. Only a few cheap laptops have ever managed a 9/10 or higher, and most laptops in such esteemed company sell for $800 or more.

We remember value when reviewing premium laptops. Our scores reflect that expensive laptops provide more for your money. For example, buying the 11.6-inch MacBook Air ($999) instead of the 11.6-inch Acer Aspire V5 ($549) will net you a better display, a much better user interface and slightly better battery life.

Some will argue that you could almost buy two Acers for the price of the Apple. That’s true, but we’re unaware of anyone capable of using two laptops at the same time.

We think that the $800 to $1,000 range is where you’ll find the best laptop value. This amount of money can’t buy you everything, but it can buy you a laptop that’s excellent in important areas. You only have to spend more if you want a gaming laptop. In that case, we recommend budgeting at least $1,500.

We don’t recommend buying something you can’t afford, but for most people, the difference between a great laptop and an OK one is just a few hundred dollars. That’s a couple nice dinners, a single weekend vacation or a couple months of going to Starbucks every day. If you need perspective, open your calculator and multiply the daily time you spend on your computer by 1,095 (the number of days in three years). The result should remind you why spending more on a laptop is worthwhilesmart.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com