Google surprised everyone on May 4th with implementing a new feature to Google+ – Collections. The feature looks promising and brings about some long anticipated and demanded functionality.
What is it and why would you care?
If you use Pinterest, Google+ Collections is almost the same as Pinterest’s boards. They give you a way to group your posts by topic and users have the ability to follow only certain topics of yours they like, instead of everything you post, like your cat’s piano skills, for instance.
This has been a long requested feature which comes at the right time to disprove the latest installment of the ‘Google+ is dead’ rumours. Being able to follow other people’s categories of posts instead of all posts is a huge leap ahead of other social media and only Pinterest had it up until recently.
Google+ Collection is giving you the freedom to share what you love without repercussions, so you can now display publicly your singing attempts without people unfollowing you. You can also use a private Collection to store your bookmarks, which is far better than using a Community for the same purpose.
Collections also give you a better ability to manage your home stream by letting you follow only the things you would like to see and enabling you to even mute whole topics if you want. You find all the Caturday photos annoying? Just hope the people you follow have put them in a separate Collection and unfollow it.
A few Collection ideas would be having a Collection for your YouTube and Blogger comments, personal hobby Collection, an event or trip Collection limited to certain people or circles, professional portfolio, product catalogue, language-specific Collection, the sky’s the limit.
It is probably a good idea to take the time and organize even your existing posts into Collections and your options are to move or reshare them. Moving posts into Collections won’t create a new post and won’t show up in your followers’ streams. Resharing a post into a Google+ Collection, however, will create a new post, so choose carefully the option you need.
Sharing a new post with a Collection is really easy, you can share it directly from the Collection in question, or just start creating a new post as usual and choose the Collection from the ‘To:’ field. Yet another option is to just move or reshare the post in the Collection after you share it initially.
Whether you are looking to better manage your Google+ account and share specific topics with friends, family or audience, or you are a photographer, online marketer or content curator, I am sure you will find Google+ Collections to be a valuable tool enhancing your personal and business lives.
Are you having fun with the new Collections feature? Share your thoughts and experiences with it in the comment section below. We would love to know what are the Collections you’ve created.
