Google Plus Beginner's Guide

One of the first things you need to do, once you join Google+ social network, is update your Google Plus Profile. It's important to do so because it allows people, in your Google Circles, to know a little more about you and build credibility.

You can decide if you want this profile to be public or only visible to your friends. In fact, you can decide how you choose to share each field on your profile. What you choose to share on your Google+ profile is up to you.

Currently, the information you can share on your profile are an introduction about yourself, your occupation, employment history, educational qualifications, places you've lived in, contact details, relationship status, gender and the like.

The video tutorial below will show you step-by-step how to update your Google+ profile including uploading your profile picture.

Another important aspect of your Google+ profile is your profile picture which allows you to build trust with others who want to connect with you. You can choose to upload your real picture or an avatar. If you've uploaded a picture of yourself to your profile and want to change it, it's easy to do in Google Plus.

You can upload pictures directly from your computer hard drive, your Google+ albums, or from your mobile smart phone (available on Androids and iPhones). The video tutorial below will show you how to upload your profile picture and change it.

Configuring your privacy settings on Google+ is something you should take the time to understand given that you may be sharing a variety of information with different people in your Google Circles. Through Google+ privacy settings, you can configure the settings in order to make your profile public or private as well as change specific fields in your profile to give access to specific information to certain people in your Circles.

Google+ privacy settings also allow you to control what information is shared with various people in your Google+ Circles. You can control whether other people in your Circles can see other Circles that you are part of.

In terms of photos, you can control who can tag you with a tag link to your Google+ profile, as well as attaching a location of the photo and whether to include that photo in your public profile to be shared with other Google+ members.

You can also change the privacy settings so your profile will not appear in search engines. Once you configure your Google+ privacy settings, you can preview what your profile looks like to other people. The video tutorial below guides you how to go about configuring your Google+ privacy settings.

Google+ Circles allow you to efficiently organize your friends or contacts in different groups like family, friends, classmates, Twitter friends, acquaintances, business clients, colleagues, etc. Using Circles you can decide which posts or information, in your Google+ profile and stream, are shared with certain people.

The video tutorial below will show you step-by-step how to create Google+ Circles, add people to your Circles, move people around within your Circles, delete people from your Circles or delete an entire Google+ Circle. The video also guides you on how to send posts and updates to your Circles.

You may want to change your Google+ email notifications settings in order to avoid being inundated with a bunch of email notifications based on your Google+ activity. By default, Google+ has been set up to send you email notifications on activity like people adding you to their Circles, posts and comments to your stream, responding to comments on your posts and updates, tagging you to a photo or video, etc.

You can change (i.e. enable and disable) these settings so that you don't receive email notifications (to your Gmail email address) for all the activity on your Google+ account. You will still see all these notifications when you log into your Google+ social network, so you won't miss any of the notifications.