I use use several social sites link up with icon on each of my 14 niche content marketing sites - Google +, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, StumleUpon, Twitter and an RSS Feed subscription.
Hands down my interactions and pluses vs. likes is no contest - Google + exceeds FB 100-1. As far as gaining link juice it's superior. Post to your pages and use authorship and you will get results and from an
SEO perspective its better than the rest.
After Page Authority, a URL's number of Google +1s is more highly correlated with search rankings than any other factor. In fact, the correlation of Google +1s beat out other well known metrics including linking root domains, Facebook shares, and even keyword usage.
Can Google+ activity actually help your pages rank higher?
- Google pages/posts are crawled and indexed almost immediately. Unlike Facebook, which hides data from Google, or Twitter, which directs Google not to follow most of its links, Google+ data is immediately and fully accessible to the company that built it.
- Pages and posts on Google+ not only accumulate PageRank, but because links to posts are followed, they pass link equity on as well.
- Google + is optimized for semantic relevance. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, each post you make in Google+ has most of the characteristics of a full-blown blog posting.
- Because of these factors, each post has the potential to send strong semantic signals to Google's search algorithm. This not only helps the post itself to rank in Google's search results, but potentially sends relevancy signals to a URL shared by the post.
- Many publishers have added Google+ authorship information to their websites in order for author photos to appear in Google search results. Another hope is that someday Google will use authorship information (and perhaps publisher information) connected to Google+ accounts to actually rank websites. While there is no evidence that Google uses anything like Author Rank at the moment, many believe it will be here very soon.
Summary:
- Start building relationships now on Google+
- Post share-worthy content on Google+ to attract natural links
- Add Google authorship information to your online content
- Link out to all relevant profiles from your Google+ "About" page
- Take advantage of rel="publisher" by connecting your website to your Google+ brand page
- Make your content easy to share on Google+ with relevant social sharing buttons
- Completely fill out your Google+ profile with relevant and engaging information
- Make it easy for people to add you to your circles
- Make your posts public