How to boost engagement on Google+

A few weeks ago I was whining that I wanted my Google+. I was on Google+ the next day, and have been enjoying myself, and testing and refining my techniques since.

I'll start out by saying that Google+, in spite of its bugs and "mere" 20 million users, is the finest social network I have used. It's more enjoyable, intuitive, and manageable than Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube. It blends the best elements from these social networks with engagement models proven to work on message boards, USENET, chat rooms, and even old style BBSes (bulletin board systems; tip o' the hat to the former SysOps among us).

That approach is paying off. Most everyone on Google+ agrees that it excels at engagement, the currency of social networking. The richer the engagement, the greater your social networking ROI. Many of us are seeing more commenting, more sharing, and more thumbs-ups (i.e., +1, Like, etc.) on Google+ than we enjoy elsewhere.

Put simply, Google+'s innovative interface and workflow lowers the bar to engagement. And you can lower the bar still further with a technique I devised and will share with you here. Follow this through to the end, because that's where the big idea is (at least, I think it's a big idea!).

I have evolved a simple yet effective approach to managing my Circles and, by extension, developing new relationships. I have all the usual Circles you expect people to set up when they first get on Google+: Friends, Family, Office (people I work with), and Colleagues (business partners and clients). All of these contain people I know.

I have some topical circles, such as Press and Writers (I'm in the media, so it's useful for me to categorize press and writers). I also have a circle for Pundits, where high-volume "must read" writers go, such as Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, and Guy Kawasaki. Some of the people in these Circles are also in my personal Circles (such as Friends, etc.).

Then there's the Titans circle, where I put people who have truly changed our world, or whose daily work has a material impact on computing, such as Vic Gundotra, Andy Hertzfeld, Matt Cutts, Tim O'Reilly, Linus Torvalds, Dave Winer, Tim Bray, and so on. With few exceptions, these are folks I don't know personally, but who I respect greatly, and whose work I have followed, in some cases, for decades.

Now for the fun part, and my interesting discovery that has turbo-charged engagement for me. I recently decided that I wanted to identify anyone who interacts with me by commenting, sharing, or adding a +1 any of my posts. Those folks get added to my Buddies Circle which, by definition, also creates a Buddies Stream.

Now, everyone on Google+ picks up new followers whom they don't have an existing relationship with. Their posts show up in the Incoming Stream. But if you pick up a lot of new followers, Incoming can become noisy and unreadable pretty fast (kind of like Twitter!). Ditto if you're following a lot (more than a few hundred) active people. Your main Stream will become loud and hard to keep up with.

Enter the Buddies Circle. Every time I check my Notifications, I add those folks who have engaged with me to the Buddies Circle. Most of these folks arrive from my Incoming stream. They're new people in my life. But people from my other Circles show up, too (for example, Harry McCracken hit +1 on one of my posts; he's now in my Press and my Buddies circles).

This, it turns out, is a great way to catalyze relationships with interesting new people, as well as forge better relationships with people in other Circles. My Buddies Circle has become the most interesting of all. The people in it are more engaged than all of my other Circles combined. The posts, shares, comments, and +1 activity is significantly higher among my Buddies than elsewhere in my personal Google+ ecosystem. Buddies is more interesting and more engaging social network, because it concentrates people who are, fundamentally, more social.

There you have it: a simple yet effective technique to boost engagement on Google+, and make new friends. Maybe it's an obvious practice and I'm behind the curve in discovering it. But if not, I suggest you try it. You might just find your Buddies become the best G+ buddies of all.