5 Google+ Page and YouTube Tips Your Boss Wants To Know

April 30th, 2014 by Search Influence

In the office I am often asked to help with doing things in Google that turn out to be fairly simple tasks but are often hard to figure out. For example, creating a custom YouTube channel URL is fairly simple to do, but the place you make this edit is not the most obvious to find. So, I’m going to walk you through 5 Google tasks I am most commonly asked to help with.

1. Change the Name of a G+ page

Sometimes we’ll bounce around for several minutes looking for where the settings tab or options part of a page is just to change one tiny detail. In the case of changing the visible name of your personal G+ page or the the listed name of your business, a quick and easy way to make the edit is through the front end of your Plus Page while logged into your account. All you have to do is click your name! From there a popup will appear allowing you to edit this field. It’s important to note that you’re not allowed to do this as many times as you’d like with your personal profile page though. You can change your profile name only up to 3 times in two years.

When changing your personal profile name you’ll see this warning about frequency:
“People change their names infrequently in the real world, so Google+ limits how often you can change your profile name.”

 

2. Make Community/MapMaker Edits to G+ Local Pages

The most common community edits we need to make to a listing happen when we’re just starting out and the listing we want to claim is owned and/or verified by someone else. The process for requesting ownership of a listing can be a lengthy one, and in the meantime you may want to update your business information from the front end. To do so, simply navigate to the Contact Information section of the businesses Plus Page under the About tab.  Then click “edit details” in the bottom left corner of the Contact Information box. The next page is the Map Maker editing screen that allows you to not only submit edits about the contents of the listing, but to also report a listing as a duplicate or closed location and report reviews that don’t belong.

3. Link/Verify A Website

We’ve recently discovered an issue when linking a business’s site to a Plus Page. After having the code added to a business’s website for linking to the Plus Page, you have to go back into G+ to make Google search for and verify that the code is on the site. You probably wouldn’t have encountered this had you done the entire process of adding the code to the site after getting it from Google, but often it’s a matter of getting the code and giving it to your developer to put on site. So in this case, you’d want to make sure to go back to where you got the code and click “Test website” in order to tell Google to check for the code. This can all be accessed from the front end of your Plus Page by clicking “Link website” under the Links section of the About page.

4. Add or Edit Managers of a G+ Page

Adding a manger to a Google Plus Page can be helpful for many situations. Businesses often want to have someone help with social media posting but don’t want to just give that person all of their login information since that is often linked to personal Gmail inboxes and the like. As with editing the name of a page, adding a manager can be done more than one way from within the account. I, however, find that the easiest and quickest way to do it is by going to settings from the home drop down in the top left corner when logged into Google Plus. Then, simply navigate to the Managers tab on the top left to access the manager permissions editing page.

5. Create a Custom YouTube Channel URL

You knew this one was coming based off of that intro, didn’t you? So, from the top right drop down menu of YouTube, click “YouTube settings,” then “Advanced,” and finally “Create custom URL.” It’s that simple but not exactly the most intuitive place to look for it, given the many other options in YouTube.

I hope at least one of these steps was helpful for you, if not all of them. Let me know in the comments below what you think!