Making the most of improvements to the +1 button

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

For the past few months,
you might have used +1 buttons
to help visitors recommend your content on Google Search and on their Google Profiles. We’ve
just announced
a few changes
that make +1 even more useful.

First, the +1 button now lets visitors share links to your pages on Google+. If someone wants to
start a conversation about your content, it’s easy for them to do so. Second, you can use
+Snippets to customize the name, image and description that appear when your content is shared.
Finally, new inline annotations help increase engagement after users see a friend’s
recommendation right on your page.

Here are a couple of tips to help you take full advantage of these improvements:

+Snippets

The +1 button opens up your site to a valuable new source of traffic with sharing on Google+.
+Snippets let you put your best face forward by customizing exactly what appears when your
content is shared.

For example, if you’re running a movie review site, you might want visitors to share posts
containing the title, movie poster, and a brief synopsis:

You
may already be using
this markup to build rich annotations for your pages on Google Search. If not, marking up your
pages is simple. Just add the correct
schema.org attributes to the data already
present on your pages. You’ll set a name, image, and description in your code:

For more details on alternate markup types, please see our
technical documentation.

Inline annotations

Now, when a person visits a page that someone they know has +1’d, they can see a name and face
reminding them to pay special attention to your content. Here’s how it looks:

To add inline annotations, you need to update your +1 button code. Visit the
configuration tool,
select ‘inline’ from the ‘Annotation’ menu, and grab a new snippet of code.

Both sharing from +1 and inline annotations are rolling out fully over the next few days. To test
these improvements right now, join our
Platform Preview group.

Posted by
Daniel Dulitz,
Group Product Manager