Why would Google+ send posts as 'messages' to people outside of your circles?
-
A day ago I uploaded a photo of a US Navy ship mooring at Bell Harbor marina, which is across from my office (near the conference center site of SMX Advanced Seattle). A rude comment was posted by someone from Germany accusing me of sending this to them personally, offended because he's anti-military: "Don't spam people pal." I blocked him.
So, since it was uploaded to my public stream and shared to my circles, I have no explanation as to how this could happen. If someone in my circles shared it to him, I suppose it could look like I sent it to him, but I haven't seen that happen before. Anyone else see behavior like this?
UPDATE: because this person was within one of the circles to whom I shared this photo, he received a notification that I'd shared it "directly" with him. See comment below.
-
Thanks for adding this information! I had wondered why people I hardly knew were sharing something "directly" with me.
-
As I hadn't had a response I neglected to add this update.
Within Google+, if you share to specific circles, anyone that you've added to that circle will receive the message "John Doe shared this directly with you."
I had shared the aforementioned waterfront photo to my "inbound marketers" circle, as almost all of them are were SMX Advanced attendees, and thus knew the adjacent Bell Harbor Marina by the conference center. The individual who whined that I was "spamming" him received a + notification that I shared this photo "directly" with him, although in reality it was to my circle.
It wasn't clear what had happened at first because I am not in his circles, though I had added him to the inbound marketers circle (he's definitely out now).
If you've set your settings up so that you'll receive no notifications from people you haven't added to circles, you won't see messages like this. It's interesting to note that if you send messages to people you've added to circles, they will see the message that it was shared directly with them. **I think this is a bad user experience in Google+, as it creates the impression that a message actually sent to a group/circle, was sent individually. **
The attached image shows a person who sent a message to her Social Media circle (of about 300 people), but looking at the verbiage "Shared a post directly with you," one might think it was a direct individual ping.
-
Hi Brian,
The popup where you choose who to share with when posting on Google+ has an option that says something like "email this post to X people not using Google+" ..it is usually checked by default on mine. Maybe this has something to do with it?
Sha
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google+ for photographers
What do you think is the best approach when it comes to using Google+ as a photographer? The images have no real SEO benefit, but the ones I post seem to get shared more, +1ed more than posting a link to one of my blog posts with a preview image. What do you think is the best way to approach this problem?
Social Media | | IoanSaid0 -
Facebook Page Banned and Removed Due to Negative Comments Against A Single Post - How to Recover?
Hello. I'm working with a very reputable company - and their Facebook page has completely disappeared. Yesterday, a random visitor flagged a couple posts as abusive, and today the page is gone. Some sort of negative social tactic. Has anyone experienced this and is there a way to recover? Is there a way to have Facebook reinstate the page? Thanks for any guidance you can provide!
Social Media | | WebTalent0 -
Facebook Promoted posts
I have been promoting posts on our Facebook page with some good results. Am I aable to determine the Day /time the post is promoted? As ideally we want to be promoting the post when people are awake? Thanks for your help
Social Media | | Hardley1111 -
Why isn't my Facebook page showing up in search results?
When I search directly for imageworks creative facebook page on Google, I get many results - some of which are not mine and some of which are listings from other citation sites like Manta. I did a site: search and I do see that the page is indexed by Google, but it's pretty important that we get a better ranking than we currently have! This is the Facebook url: https://www.facebook.com/ImageWorksCreative As part of our rebranding, we did have the URL changed from /imageworksstudio, but that was well over a month ago. I feel as though Google should have caught up by now. Any thoughts on how we can get our FB profile onto the front page?
Social Media | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Gain Access to Google+ Profile
We are having trouble accessing a Google+ profile for a client. We know the profile we want to gain access to, but the client doesn't remember the email or password. The marketing company they worked with before also doesn't know what the email or password is to claim the profile. We have tried contacting Google to gain access to the email, but they were unable to give us the login email due to privacy issues. If you have any suggestions to gain access to this profile, it is greatly appreciated. Please take in mind the following: We do not know the email nor have access to obtaining it We do know the profile we want to gain access to
Social Media | | flowsimple0 -
Request: Feedback on new free tool that provides social analytics for recent blog posts
We have created a tool that provides "at a glance social metrics" for the URLs listed in an RSS feed. Its intended purposes are: Monitor the social success of your recent blog posts Spy on the social success of your competitors' recent blog posts Quickly analyze a blog for social sharing metrics to determine whether it is a good outreach prospect or guest post opportunity Check out the tool at http://www.rypmarketing.com/tools/rss-social-analyzer.php I've attached a report run on the YouMoz RSS feed. Would love to hear some feedback on the tool... Do you think the tool is useful? Nice, but not worthwhile? What could be done to improve it? What ways do you think it will be most useful? Thanks! RSSSocialAnalyzer-YouMoz.png
Social Media | | AdamThompson0 -
What's a good social media content creation brief template?
I'm trying to put together a brief template for our copywriters to use when requesting the creation of a piece of content. These are the points I have thought of so far are: Subject / Topic Content Objective Desired User Outcome / Call to action Sources, References Tone of voice Related product information Target SEO keywords Can you think of anything else to add? Do you know good resources (articles, blog post) tackling the subject of a content creation brief? Thanks in advance.
Social Media | | Amiee0 -
Do keywords in a URL that's linkified provide anchor text benefits?
I'm curious about links that are just URLs (e.g. http://www.google.com/reader) or in a URL-like format (e.g. Google.com/Reader) vs links with plain-word anchor text (e.g. Google Reader). If a link that is just a URL (or a partial URL) has keywords in it, do those keywords provide anchor text relevance benefits? I'm particularly thinking about URL shorteners that provide customized links, and social media. Many web tools (twitter, blog comment systems) don't render HTML but will automatically link URLs. If http://boston.craigslist.org/jjj/ gets linked to through custom shortened URLs like http://bit.ly/Boston-Jobs, is it more likely to rank for the term "Boston Jobs" than if it received the same number of links using a non-custom shortened URL like http://bit.ly/ejq5uX9?
Social Media | | Jay.Neely0