What this book covers
Chapter 1, Joining Plus and What to Do First. This chapter introduces that excitement and how you can best join, and the kind of initial setup that guarantees a successful and fun-filled experience.
In it, we will:
- Take look at the advantages of Plus
- See how to join and do it
- Discuss privacy concerns
- Set up our profiles (yes, we'll want more than one).
Chapter 2, Sorting Everyone in to Circles. We will:
- Learn how Circles work and their tremendous advantages
- Set up our first Circles for Friends, Acquaintances, and Family
- Decide who we want to follow and learn how to do so
- Master easy dragging and dropping in maintaining our Circles
- Create and use new types of Circles beyond the standard ones
It's easy to add friends. Thumbnail photos are generated from your regular Google profile so if a photo is not attached to that yet, we won't see you. Not everyone will have a thumbnail ID yet, as shown in the following screenshot:
Chapter 3, Hanging Out. Other social media systems are adding video chat and related features. Plus was designed from the ground up with these fun and powerful things built in!
In this chapter, we will see (literally see) how Hangouts work.
- What Hangouts are and how we use them
- Setting up a webcam or other video input
- Joining existing Hangouts
- Creating your own Hangouts
Here I am checking my hair (uh huh) and preparing to hang out:
Chapter 4, Streaming. Two major topics join us in this chapter—Streams and Sparks.
In this chapter it's time to:
- Practice Posting to the Stream and determine how to drill down so that each Post goes to the right audience
- Learn how to control what we see and when we see it (as opposed to all those zillions of posts you're not interested in but which make you miss the good stuff on other social networks)
Chapter 5, Sharing Media. Plus gives us powerful built-in features for sharing photos, videos, animated gifs, and so on. We'll enjoy learning those in this chapter.
So here we:
- Select and prepare photos for uploading
- Upload and caption photos
- Select and prepare videos
- Upload and caption videos
- Learn how to share to your various Circles or make public
Chapter 6, Mobile and Games. In today's world of smartphones, we take our social networks with us.
Together, we will be:
- Finding the right app for your phone or tablet computer
- Learning how to keep up with Circles, and so on, on the mobile device
- Posting from your phone
- Uploading photos and videos from your phone or other device
This is what Plus looks like on the free Android app (iPhone and others no charge too):
Chapter 7, Promoting on Plus the Right Way. Many people use social media, like Facebook, to promote themselves, their company, their organization, or a cause. This is fine as long as we do it right and don't offend anyone. If people get irritated by your actions, then they won't pay attention to you.
In this chapter, we learn to do it right, politely, and effectively by knowing about:
- Netiquette, what it is, and why you should use it
- Setting up accounts for a business or organization
- Advertising without it looking like an ad
- Marketing politely, but in an interesting manner that works
- Networking with others
- Starting groups
Appendix. This chapter provides helpful websites and other resources.