Gadgetory

what's up guys it's Lou from unbox therapy and the purpose for this video is to give you guys an idea of some of the tips and tricks that can help you become a better user in Google Plus Google Plus being Google's new social network now a lot of people by this point have tried other social networks and have probably gotten used to how things work and function within them Google+ being new is a little bit different but not too complicated and after you've watched this video you're probably going to feel a lot better about using it on a daily basis so without further ado let's get straight into it the first and maybe most important tip that I wrote down here is how to mention people now this is important because that's what you're constantly doing is interacting with others hence the title social network so the way to do this in Google+ is different from Twitter you know in Twitter you use an @ symbol on Google+ you're going to use a plus symbol what a surprise how cute so you start with a plus symbol and then begin to type the users name that you want to mention or reply to in a comment section for example and if they're in your circle they probably come up even before you're finished typing their name at that point you type your message and they receive a notification from there that you have mentioned them or reply to them super simple easy to do I'm happy that you know now that people can start doing it properly because to this point people have been all over the place at least in my network the next thing I want to mention is the ability to edit posts this is unique to Google+ other networks did not have the ability to do this up until this point and this is important because you might type a long post and then not want to go back you know delete it and rewrite it if there's an error this way you can go in fix the error and then leave the post up or in my case delete it because maybe it's a dumb post to begin with so you can do anything like that from this little drop-down menu and I personally think it's an awesome feature I really wish the other networks had it as well the next thing I want to talk about is private messages now a lot of people have asked how do I private message they're used to the way it's done on Facebook or Twitter and this one is a little bit more complicated I think Google needs to fix this but at the moment it's the only way that it can be done some are calling it a hack but I mean it's not too hard to do I wouldn't I wouldn't go so far as to call it a hack so what you want to do is you want to share a post the way you normally would identify the individual that you want to send the message to or mention in the post but you don't want to share it publicly and you don't want to share it with your other circles so make sure that they're just selected from there you want to share the post and then after the post is shared if you select the drop down menu from there then you can select to not make it shareable from that point so that will sort of close off the post it'll leave it there dead the only person who can access it is the one that you originally mentioned so that's a way of keeping a message private until Google does something other than this system for private messages the next thing that I want to talk about is how to turn off circle sharing this is something that I did after a bunch of people started having my family members and whatnot to their circles so you can do that very easily by clicking over here underneath the your image your profile image and you can turn off either the sharing of the circles that you're in or the people that have you in circles or the only other way around whatever the hell I'm saying this whole circle system it's a little bit mind-boggling not really but anyways yeah you can make certain aspects of circle sharing private from that window there the next thing I want to mention is how to get a more attractive URL for your Google+ profile at the moment it is a long string of numbers and numeric profiles are cool they're just not cool anymore so what you want to do is go to a website called G+ tio of course you could go to any URL shortening website but this one's a little bit cooler and cleaner and specific to Google+ so you want to go to G+ tio and from there you want to put in your string of numbers that currently identifies you along with your desired nickname and then from there that will give you a public location that's a little bit cleaner when you are sharing that profile elsewhere in emails or on places like YouTube etc because as we know those big huge URLs are not very attractive and nobody wants to click them nobody wants to click an unattractive URL so I think I've got one more thing to mention yes that is the ability to format posts you can do things like put words in bold or italic and this is kind of cool just to maybe have your posts stand out over other things or other posts that are in people's newsfeeds you know and this is very simple to do I'll give you an example using the word bold here all you've got to do is put stars on each side of the word bold and boom it's gonna come out bold so that's cool a very basic feature I don't know how many people are going to take advantage of it but good to know nonetheless anyway guys I hope these tips and tricks help you in your transition from those other social networks and if you haven't jumped on Google+ yet then I'm gonna put an invite link down in the description of this video so hopefully you come over there if you have any trouble with that link or if the link runs out of invites then hit me inside my inbox here on YouTube or email me or whatever you want to do and I'll try my best to get you over there I'm excited about this social network it's gonna be a big player and I think everybody should get a head start on just how to use it so once it goes public and everyone comes over you're ready to go anyway guys until next time thanks for watching and if you enjoyed this content hopefully you'll hit that subscribe button up there see you guys