How people are using Circles #Google+

I recently ran a poll on Google+ asking people how they are using Circles. Feel free to join in on that conversation if you’re playing around with Google+.

The general consensus was that people have multiple Circles that they put people in to. Almost like tags. I unfortunately started off trying to put people into only one Circle and now am trying to go back and rectify this. Some of the comments were:

Lindsay: At first, I put everyone in only one. But, I revised. Ex: I created a “techies” circle to encompass people in general interested in tech things (which are subsets of friends, work people, acquaintances, etc.). A work in progress …

Matt: Multiple. There are people I consider friends, but also fit into the techie or social media nerds circles. Also, I have a ‘just for fun’ circle (which is the majority of my connections), where I can share the things I don’t want any professional contacts or acquaintances seeing.

Thorin: I am trying to base my circles almost like keyword tags on a blog. It doesn’t make sense to me to not have multiples. I don’t want to annoy my non-tech friends with technology articles/insights, but I do want to share my kids pictures with them, therefore they have to be in multiples.

Vlad: Like +Lindsay said, Circles are a content segmentation tool, especially if you have disparate interests that don’t always overlap (e.g. dog walking an digital marketing) and therefor friends from one Circle are not expecting content designed for another Circle altogether.

For business collaboration: it would make sense to segregate colleagues based on project, especially when sharing details that are only relevant to specific teams.

For brands: I would imagine a Coca-Cola would segregate their super-influences in a dedicated Circle. This helps when posting “exclusive” content and definitely helps when starting a Hangout to avoid adding people manually, one-by-one. I’m curious if brands have already started using or perhaps strategizing the use of G+ Hangouts and Circles.+Brian would you mind chiming in?

p.s. after you read this post, you may create a Circle for individuals that provide quick and easy to read answers and those that write Whitepapers instead.

Jonathan: I go multiple. I think that’s the beauty of the circles. You can create custom made social groups that represent how your interactions occur in real life. For example, I engage the people I’m closest to in multiple social environments (friends, my family, your family, professional, etc) and thus multiple “circles” enable me to incorporate them in the same manner. However, there are those interactions that occur less frequently. For those “acquaintances”, just like in real life, I only view those comments periodically when browsing along the internet highway. Once this starts to take off, it would be very interesting to see the how users’ contacts overlap different circles in Google+.

And Katie, like me: started off as one, ended as multiple.

PS – here is my current Circle set up:

Currently my Circles in Google+