• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Following are a few other ways to potentially organize your circles—the first of which we just explained in a use case:

• Local: If you’re in Boston or Mumbai, include a circle for people who are local to your area. This helps with prospects for your business and can give you more local news to keep current on what happens in your area.

• Thinkers: No matter what you call it, there are people you’ll want to follow who have ideas that are different than yours and who make you think. This kind of circle is where you go for inspiration.

• Competitors: I personally don’t do a lot of competitive analysis for my business, but that’s me. If you’re from Apple, maybe this is Dell employees. If you’re a photographer, maybe you name this Colleagues but secretly think of them as competitors. It’s your decision.

• News: I have a Journalists circle so that I can read what they’re doing, comment on what they’re talking about, and get myself generally known. Although this is partially so that I can appreciate their work, it’s also so that they might get to know me, and then think of me, should a story arise that I could help with. You can do this in other ways, having journalists get to know you, but that is covered later.

• Potential Employees: Think about that. If you want to hire people to run community development for your great new software platform, maybe this is a way to keep an eye on them.

• Vendors: A lot of web design and WordPress people follow me, and I’m often asked for people who do that kind of work. Putting together a circle of people who do something that pertains to your business might be useful. It’s like keeping a little directory handy.

• Personal Passion: I have a circle of comic book artists, writers, and professionals in that industry. This has no direct business value to me. I just love comic books and have since I was 5 or 6. Feel free to make a circle about something you care about, even if this is your business account and even if the bosses might frown on it. Know why? Because it’s out of these serendipitous connections that can bring you other connections. That was how I interviewed Greg Pak (a writer, currently doing interesting stuff for Marvel Comics, among others) for this book.

• Prospects: Okay, so adding people to this circle is difficult at present. People don’t exactly line themselves up and say, “I’m really anxious to buy what you’re selling.” But if you do a little searching and a little thinking, you might start to find ways to add people to a circle like this. Just realize something important: Just because someone looks like your prospect doesn’t mean they’re all that interested in you selling something to them. Tread gently.

Who Should You Follow?

As stated before, you can check at http://findpeopleonplus.com to see if any particular occupation, locale, or some other identifying factor helps you determine whether someone is interesting to follow. You can also search on Google.com by adding site:plus.google.com to your search, and then adding in a search term that you think might prove useful in finding someone of interest. If, for instance, you want to find people talking about yoga, you can type the following into Google: site:plus.google.com yoga.

If that doesn’t narrow it down enough, you can add more search terms, and you can use a -term type of search to filter even more. For instance, I used the word “Boston” after “yoga” and found people talking about yoga and having something to do with Boston. It’s not perfect, but it’s one way to find more potential people of interest.

Friendsurfing

In the early days of using Google+, one way I found interesting people to follow was that I friendsurfed. By this, I mean that I would find someone whom I followed or found interesting, and I would click into that person’s profile. From there, I’d see who he or she had chosen to add to his or her circles, and I would sometimes add some of the same people.

For instance, I just went to Greg Pak’s profile, and