Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, cause organizations, businesses, brands, social media managers, Web publishers, bloggers, individuals.

Lately, I’ve been using Google Plus as a way to find, collect and create content.

Here are some examples of what I’ve been doing — I’d love to hear your thoughts on these uses for Google Plus.

Search

The search features in Google Plus are extremely robust. You can search public posts, posts shared with you, personal profiles (the parts that are public or shared with you), Pages and Sparks.

You can even use Google’s Search Operators when searching Google Plus. This allows you to fine-tune the results and save time.

When you do a search on Google Plus, you can also save the search in your left sidebar, under “What’s Hot.”

Discover

A common way to use Circles is to categorize people you follow based on their area of expertise. I have a circle that includes nonprofit techies, where I’ve discovered useful articles, ideas and discussions.

What makes using Circles different from using search is that Circles allows for off-topic discoveries that could never happen with “pre-meditated” searches.

Collect

When we think of Google Circles, we normally view them as a tool to organize people. But why not create circles for storing content that you’ve discovered on Google Plus?

You can do this by creating a circle and adding only you to this circle. When you do this, anything that you share with this circle will only be seen by you. This stream is located under your profile image with all of your other circle streams.

Create

When you create a private circle as described immediately above, you can add notes, links and even draft ideas for your content piece. Remember that no one can see any of this because you’ve shared the circle with yourself (you also don’t need to lock the post).

How have you been using Google Plus for creating content?

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