Google_ for Business_ How Google's Social Network Changes Everything - Chris Brogan [28]
Conversely, just because you’ve circled someone, it doesn’t mean they’ll see your posts, even if you mention them in a post. (Chapter 6, “Posting in the Stream,” talks about what that means.) The act of circling someone simply means that you’ve chosen to add them to people you follow. It doesn’t mean you’ve opened two-way communications between them.
How Do I Know Who Is Circling Me Back?
You can look for who is circling you in three ways. First, if you’re looking at someone specific, you can just click that person’s name, and you get to his profile page. Under the big red button that says Add to Circles, it’ll say something such as You Are in Vincenzo’s Circles.
You can also look by going to https://plus.google.com/notifications/circle (see Figure 5-2).
Figure 5-2 Notifications of people who have added you to a circle.
This enables you to see who’s added you to a circle lately, and it’s a handy place to decide whether you want to add them back.
Of the methods, this is the most visual way to see who has added you, but it’s also probably the slowest method if you want to better understand who’s who and whether you want to add them back. It’s up to you how you want to organize people, but for me, it’s option 2 for understanding who’s added me and determining whether it’s valuable.
The third way is to go to your main Circles tab (the fourth tab at the top of the Google+ page), and click People Who’ve Added You. On that view, if you see a little circle in the bottom right of the user’s rectangle, you’ve added them back. If you don’t, you haven’t.
Reciprocal Follows
A question I’m frequently asked is whether you should circle back everyone who’s chosen to add you to their circles. On Twitter, I used to say yes, and that there was no reason why not to follow someone back on Twitter. But this is different because who you choose to circle impacts what you see when you look at the regular stream, and it impacts who sees what you choose to post, and so on.
It is not required that you reciprocate and follow back everyone who chooses to follow you. That’s a personal preference, and you can decide whether that’s useful to you. On Google+, different than Twitter, I’ve decided not to circle everyone back who adds me. The reason is that the more people I add, the harder it is to manage the stream of information I choose to consume. You’ll come to your own opinions, and you’ll likely change them a few times.
You can hover over anyone’s picture in this view. You see a name and occasionally some information under the name. Do you remember all that fuss I made in Chapter 4, “First Moves with Google+,” about this? Now, you can see why.
Although it’s probably more useful to know who has connected with you, the majority of work you’ll do in circles is the organization of the people you’ve chosen to follow. Let’s talk about how to arrange circles, what to do with them, and a few little technical tidbits. We start with naming the circles because this is every bit as important (in some ways) as deciding where to gather people.
Creating Circles and Naming Them
Click your Circles tab, which is the fourth button on top of the Google+ screen. Those little blue circles down at the bottom of the screen come prenamed, but you can change any of them to be what you want them to be. I highly recommend that you make that your first order of business.
To create a new circle, should you need a few more than what you see below, go to the dotted-line circle at the bottom-left corner of the screen, hover your mouse over it, and click Create Circle. Easy cheesy.
But what you name them and how you use them is something that we explore here, so look at a few ways to think about that.
First, realize that