In this video, I’m gonna show you how to customize your Google Buzz profile page. Now, if you watched the previous video, then you’ll know that this is a completely new Google…uh, GMail account, actually, and also a completely new Buzz account that I’ve created, and I randomly started following three people – as you can see down here – it says I’m following 3 people.
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Now, out of those 3 people that I’ve followed, 2 of them have decided to follow me back, alright? So I have 2 followers. Even though I use a very weak name – even though it sounds like a fake – it is a fake name; I just used ‘Actual Name’ – but still, somehow, two people have decided to follow me. And therein lies the secret of this type of social media networking, is that the more people you follow, the more who will choose to follow you.
Okay, so that aside, now let’s take a look at how to customize your Google Buzz profile page. As you can see, your name is hyperlinked to your profile page, but you can also click on Edit, and on the profile editing page, you can actually fill up as much information as you’re willing to share; for example, some information on your background – Where I grew up; Where I live now; Places I’ve lived; Current company; What I do, Current school, etc. One good reason why you may want to be accurate with this field is that it helps people who are searching Google Buzz to find you. So some people may eb searching for people who are in their current company or current school or previous school, etc. So it just helps you to reach more people and enables more people to find you.
And next, you can add a little short bio about yourself here, and it comes with a very basic editor, so as you can see, I’ve created a very short profile. And then you can also put in some of your interests, etc. And the most important thing is to add links to your website or blog, because this is how Google Buzz will search for your latest blog updates and then add those latest updates into the Google Buzz itself automatically.
Okay, so once you’ve put in your URL and your Link name, then you can just click on Add, and Google has added that website, or in this case, it’s a WordPress blog, to my profile page, and soon Google will start indexing my blog and start syndicating some of the latest content from that blog to my Google Buzz profile.
Now, by default, your Google Buzz profile is a series of numbers, but you can also make it into a more search engine-friendly and a more attractive profile link by choosing this option here, which is to change a profile URL to the one below. However, at the moment, you would not be able to change your actual profile name. Instead, this is really tied to your GMail account. So if your GMail account is [email protected], then that’s what you’ll get as your full profile URL. Okay, so when you’re done, click on Save Changes.
Alright, and it says here now, “Your profile is not yet eligible to be featured in Google search results. To have your profile featured, add more information about yourself.†So basically, what Google is telling you is that you need to add more personal information about yourself in order to be featured in the search results. And if you followed the video earlier, I did not add a lot of important fields here. So as long as you fill up…you don’t have to fill up every single field, but as long as you fill up most of these fields, then your profile will be made available in the Google search results, and people can either search for your particular profile name or search by some other criteria here – for example, company, school, hobbies, etc. and add you and start following you in Google Buzz. So that’s how simple it is to customize your Google Buzz profile.