Google Plus Tips of the Week

Your Google Plus Tips of the Week for May 3rd

- Brand your YouTube with intro videos

-  New mobile apps for Docs, Sheets and Slides—work offline and on the go

- Hangout drawing tool

Brand Your Videos With Watermarks & Intros

YouTube tips from Peggy K H/T Ronnie Bincer & Scott Scowcroft

Video branding:

This may be useful, but 3 seconds isn’t a lot of time. I see this basically as an opening logo as opposed to a lead in.

(from YouTube Creator site)

It only takes three easy steps to set up:

1. Upload the three-second intro video you’d like to use to your channel as an unlisted video.

2. On your channel's InVideo Programming page, click "Add a channel branding intro" and select the intro from a list of eligible videos.

3. Select which videos you want the intro to appear on. You can choose whether to add it to all of your videos, or just the ones you’ve uploaded after a certain date. You can always remove or change the intro later.

Note that these intros may not be used as ads, sponsorships, or product placements. We also don't recommend this feature be used by channels using their videos as advertisements.

You can also add a watermark to your videos.
Go to your YouTube video manager and select “channel Settings” then “in video Programming”. 
You’ll be given options to:

1. Add a watermark

2. Feature a video pr playlist

3. Add a branding intro

Add a Custom Thumbnail to Your YouTube Video

For the #GPlusLunchBunch show, I usually use my event banner as my custom thumbnail for consistency with the HOA event.

There are other times when a screen grab from the show is more compelling.

If you want to add a custom thumbnail, YouTube account must be in good standing, and you must have monetization enabled on your channel.

Check your account's Features tab to see if your channel is eligible for custom thumbnails.

Google Drive Docs & Sheets Get their own apps

via Brian Levee  - GoogleDrive Blog

With their eye on ever increasing mobile usage, Google has separated Docs and Sheets (and soon, Slides) from Drive and made them their own downloadable apps for iOS and Android.

I think this is a great idea especially on mobile as it can get tedious (especially on the iPhone) to sort through the Drive folders to find a specific document.  It’S also easy to switch over to Drive at anytime.

You can get the apps on Google Play and in the App Store. If you don’t have time now, over the next few days you’ll be prompted to download the apps when you go to edit or create a document or spreadsheet in your Drive app.

Hangout Drawing Tool App

Finally, after this week of Google Plus is dead rumours and counter rumours, I leave you with a bit of fun.
Ronnie Bincer brought this to my attention earlier this week. It’s a drawing app that enables us to draw freeform, add text and stamp images of arrows, speech bubbles etc right on our Hangout screen.

Even if you're not a Picasso (as I'm obviously not) the text and stamps functions are useful.

For instance, when we want to post a link during a HOA, we can text it on the screen as well as posting in the comments section.

I haven’t tried it in an actual Hangout yet so if anyone is game to play, let me know.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Please share if you think it might be helpful to someone.
Check out our past #GPlusLunchBunch shows on my YouTube channel or Google+ Page.

Google Plus Tips of the Week

Shakespeare's "content" still resonates after 450 years.

Your Google+ Tips for April 26

1. What Triggers the New Large Image Link Shares on Google Plus?

2. How to make a Notify Me Circle

3. 100 Google Drive Tips & Hacks

How to trigger full column width Post Thumbnails

h/t Eric Enge, MaAnna Stephenson

Last Month Google+ caught up with Facebook and Twitter and offered full column wide blog post images on embedded links

ts.

This is when you share your own blog post or someone else’s but inserting a link in the “link” field or inside the text body of a Google+ post.

This is an example of typical shared post with small thumbnail along with title, linked to G+ icon and name of site.

The above post is a share from my website that rendered full column wide and includes title, connected to G+ Page icon with name of website and the meta description.

I’ve noticed a lot of small thumbnails still appearing in my stream still and wondered why more sites weren’t optimizing their images to display larger on Google+ shares. From what I can determine, the originating web page that you’re sharing to Google+ should have at least one image that is a minimum 506 px wide.

It should have the og (Open Graph) tag on it. ( <meta property="og:type" content="article"> )

I’m using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast which supplies this. Under “social” then Facebook, check to have the plugin supply all the necessary og tags including image, title of post and the excerpt.

If you're using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, under Social > Facebook, there is a checkbox to have this plugin supply all of the necessary og tags, including for the image, the title of the post, and the excerpt.

Check out this post by Kristi Hines: 6 WordPress Plugins That Ensure Your Posts Look Good When Shared on Social Media

How to Make Sure You Never Miss the Best Stuff on Google+

Dustn.tv

Managing circles and controlling the what you see and who you see in your Google+ stream is challenging. There are so many variables; your own setting, the people in your circle’s settings, Communities and Events.

It’s important, especially if you’re trying to establish relationships with people that you see and interact with as much as their content as you can.

I place my priority circles in the first four, that way they appear at the top of my home stream and I don’t forget to check them out. 
However, I still miss important posts because:

1. I have too many people in those circles and/or

2. Posts stream by as I check other circles.

The best way to not miss a post is to receive a notification each time that person publishes.

As Dustin points below, you have to be careful to not have too many people in your “subscriber” circles as you'll be inundated with notifications.

Dustin shows us how to create a "subscription circle". This is a circle into which you put people whose posts you don't want to miss. So when they publish a post, you either get a notification in your email (depending on your settings) and through Mr. Jingles", the bell notification icon on the upper right of your screen.

As you can see in the attached image, it's pretty easy:

1. Hover your pointer over the person's name. Their hovercard will pop up.

2. Hover over the circle button on their hovercard and add them to the circle 

that you want to be your Subscription circle.

3. Click on that circle's stream and make sure you have the little bell in the top right corner clicked to "On" (it should be colored red).

100 Important Google Drive Tips for Teachers and Students

h/t Jaana Nystrom

Google Drive is increasingly becoming the collaborative tool for work, school and organizations.

While not as robust in features included in proprietary software like Microsoft Office, it packs a lot of features at a very low price. The first 15GB of storage is free.

I’ve yet to discover all of the tricks and hacks to be found in Drive, but if you’re adventurous, here’s 100 of them brought to you by Educators Technology

I won’t list them all here, but here’s a list of categories with a few links to a few I want to check out: 

Keyboard Shortcuts - Productivity Hacks - Features and Tools - Collaboration - Files, Folders and Filters - Organization - Edits - Synchronization - Search - Presentations - Spreadsheets - Tasks

Check out the full list here: 100 Important Google Drive Tips

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Please share if you think it might be helpful to someone.

Check out our past #GPlusLunchBunch shows on my YouTube channel or Google+ Page.