To make a success of your online business, you cannot ignore social networking sites, otherwise also known as Web 2.0 sites. The biggest of this is of course Facebook which is now boasting 1 billion regular users. Twitter is the second biggest network followed by the newest, Google+. Google+ was formed in 2011. After a succession of forays by Google into social networking it has currently settled on Google+. Today it has 400 million users with about a 100 million of them being active users on a per month basis. Following the recent Google search algorithm changes known as Google Panda and Google Penguin, more emphasis is now given to Web 2.0 traffic to websites. In other words if you wished your website to rank higher in Google, you need to get more traffic from sites such as Google+. Google monitors all links to websites and it will boost rankings of all sites with deep Web 2.0 links. Google+ also offers an identity service. It insists only real people sign up. Once it has your real profile, it will, if you wished, verify your website in Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) by attaching your Google+ profile photo whenever your site appears in SERP. Google will boost your site's ranking if it is verified by Google+. So, for any serious website owner or blogger, it is important to be part of Google+. To many internet users, the fact that Google strongly discourages the use of online pseudonym seems unfair. They argue that since the privacy controversy is still not settled, revealing too much of yourselves online poses threats and should be avoided. From Google's point of view, real people posting good material online will ultimately boost their own credibility in the long run. Google+ is not only the newest social network, but it has also brought with it some important and unique changes to the social networking scene. For instance, Google+ makes it a breeze to segment your friends. For instance on Facebook, if you posted something, each one of your friends and perhaps friends of friends can see what you have done. In Google+, you can be more selective about who can see what you are doing each time. You can segment your friends into a limitless number of "circles" (short for" circle of friends") if you wished. So, for instance, if you wanted to show photos of what you got on at the weekend to only some of your friends and not everyone (because some of these friends might be work related), then you can do so by segmenting these friends into separate circles. So you could have "out of work friends" circle and "work friends" circle. This simple, yet ingenious feature means that you can target your audience even more accurately. You could compose your messages in such a way that it targets each circle precisely with what they want to hear from you. Another good feature is that the people you connect to do not know which of your circle they belong to. All they know is that they have a connection with you. So you can go ahead and name your circles whichever way you wished. One other notable feature in Google+ is the "Hangout" where you can invite friends in your circle to participate all at the same time in a live video session. This seems to be a very powerful feature especially for conducting business. There are many interesting features in Google+ which is beyond this article to discuss and I am sure there will be others coming along in the future which will enhance the capabilities of Google+ even further. With Google Search continuing to dominate the search arena and further consolidate its power, you would be unwise to disregard Google+. In its current ranking algorithm, Google+ is a feature amongst others but none the less an important feature you would be ill advised to ignore if you wished your site to rank higher in Google SERP. To your social media marketing success! Hanif Somani, Ph.D is an Internet Marketer and Forex Trader. Hanif obtained his Ph.D. from University of London in a scientific discipline and is passionate about conveying complex ideas to his audience in a simple but not simpler way. Hanif believes that anyone can succeed in their endeavors if they first obtain the knowledge and then apply it correctly in an incremental way. Knowledge is the key to success and this is what Hanif is happy to convey and share. I write regularly on all aspects of Online Income Sources which you can find on my blog at Making Money Online [http://simplymakingmoneyonline.net]. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7321723