You’ve tamed your Twitter spam, isolated Grandma on Facebook, and finally become Mayor of the coffee shop you pretend to work at while you’re really playing Angry Birds. Then, along comes Google+, and now you’re circling people like an angry John Madden.

As search marketers, there’s value in social media – I can trace real revenue to it, and I’m not the only one. The first 30 minutes are incredibly valuable – it’s the next 7 hours that are the problem. I understand both extremes – I once spent 24 straight hours on Twitter, and I’ve quit social media cold-turkey for 30 days twice.

So, here are a few tips for adding Google+ to the mix without losing what little work-day you have left:

Mind Your Circles

When I first joined Google+, I joked that my circles looked something like this:

The visual simplicity and cute animations make the real power of circles easy to miss, and it’s something Facebook and Twitter don’t do very well (at least without 3rd-party apps). Circles are an essential way to not only manage who you’re following, but to manage your time.

When you’re short on time, you don’t have to follow what everyone is saying – focus on a core circle or two. Circles can go a lot deeper than relationships, too (and they can overlap). Consider circling people by:

• Job/Industry
• Interests
• Activity level
• Likelihood to engage
• Country or time-zone

The list goes on, but the key is to think in terms of how you can best use your time. If you log on at 2am in the US, see what your UK friends are up to. If you’re only on for 5 minutes, check the people who are interested in whatever you’re working on at that moment (for inspiration). If you really need to get a link out, see what the people most interested in that niche are up to.

Flow with the Stream

Eventually, you have to accept that you can’t keep up with everything. Google+ is just out of its wrapper, and yet 15 minutes would barely let me skim the last hour of activity, let alone the links and comments. For reference, the bar on the right is a condensed version of my unexpanded stream from just the last hour.

This is more philosophical than tactical, but you have to let it go. The real-time stream is just that – jump in, swim forward, and don’t worry too much about what’s behind you. If it’s important, it’ll get repeated.

Social media is so real-time that it can even alienate people to rewind too much. I’ve had people comment on something I said the day before on Twitter, and it completely confused me. With Google+ and Facebook, the conversation structure is easier to manage, but past a point we move on. Right or wrong, that’s the nature of the beast.

Engage Your Base

This tip can tie into your circles, but it applies to any social media platform. When you’re short on time, engage the people most likely to reply or reciprocate. They may be your friends, your fans, or just generous personalities who you happen to get along with.

This isn’t about opportunism – it’s about relevance. If you’ve only got 15 minutes (which is probably split into 5-minute chunks), check in on the people whose content and interaction you value. You have to pick and choose – 5 minutes will barely get you through one hilarious cat video and half the comments.

Be Highly Visible

Ultimately, social media is all about perception. You don’t have to be on it all day – you just want to seem like you’re always nearby (but not too nearby, because then you’re obviously goofing off).

Back in graduate school, I had a roommate who was always in his office – he regularly got there at 8am, closed the door, and didn’t come out until 8pm. Meanwhile, I liked a little variety, so I’d work at home, in the lab, and in my office. In between, I roamed the halls and talked to a lot of people. Granted, I also liked to procrastinate, but I valued the social aspect of school.

One day, someone commented that I was always around, but they never saw my roommate. Here he was putting in 12 hours days in the office, while I usually spent 4-6 hours/day in the office or lab. Was it fair? No, but it taught me an important lesson – perception is everything.

Being visible in social media is easy – engage. In fact, make the first 5 minutes of your 15 minutes all about engagement. Reply to people, [+1] their posts, and generally make yourself seen. Lurkers die lonely.

Give First, Then Ask

So, you’ve spent the first 5 minutes making your presence known. The next 5 minutes, in my opinion, should be all about giving. Share other people’s posts and links, and [+1] what you like. If you run out of time, that’s fine. Giving back builds up dividends, and you need to do it every day. That way, when it’s your turn to share a link, you’ve already got friends lined up.

There are a lot of ways to handle social media, and I don’t think any single style is right, but I do think that virtually everyone should try to give a lot more than they take. This isn’t just altruism – reciprocity is a very powerful thing.

Bonus Tip: Try Trunk.ly

We’re desperately afraid to miss anything on social media. Practically speaking, I’ve found that fear overblown – most things can be missed, and the important stuff will keep appearing in your stream. For tracking your links, though, I highly recommend Trunk.ly. It not only captures the links you post on Twitter and Facebook, but your friends' links as well:

Yes, that is a link to a Smurfberry Crunch Ad from 1982 – STOP JUDGING ME! The best thing about Trunk.ly is that it aggregates recent links from your friends. While it doesn’t support Google+ yet, I expect it to soon. If anyone knows of similar tools that do support Google+, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Double Bonus Fun!

This probably has no value other than general mischief-making, but I made a Photoshop version of the Google Circle that you can easily edit (or possibly even convert into other shapes). It was created in Adobe CS5 for Windows, but hopefully it’s readable by other versions. You can use it to create such useful diagrams as:

I honestly have no idea how this can be used for good, but I made it and so I thought I’d share. Here's the link to download the Google+ Circle Photoshop file (it's only 100KB).